[net.news] Is there a way to do this in "rn"?

wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin ) (04/26/85)

I've been using "rn" instead of readnews for the past few months
and find it pretty good and I think I prefer it to readnews. Looking
at the "help" info and the manual, though, I haven't found answers
to these points (doesn't mean it isn't there, just that I haven't
found it :-):

1) How do I get rn to automatically skip over duplicate postings
in subsequent newsgroups? When the same item is posted to several
newsgroups, readnews will remember if you read it already within that same
execution of the process, and only show it to you once. It seems that 
rn will always show you each copy. This seems a step backward, so I
am assuming that I just haven't figured out how to get it to do this.

2) Is there a way to get rn to look at the Newsgroups: field the
way it now looks at the Subject: field? You can use "k" to kill 
or mark as read articles with a certain subject. How about getting it
to mark as read anything that was also posted to a given newsgroup?
For example, let's say I get into net.flame with 400 unread articles,
having finally caught up on groups of more interest to me. I know I
have already seen everything that was also posted to "net.legal", say,
using the "Personal Defense" discussion as an example. However, if
I just "k" everything that has "Personal Defense" in the Subject: field,
I will also wipe out those articles that were sent to "net.flame" ONLY
(yes, some people DO  do the right thing and restrict the number of
newsgroups!) and I don't want to do that -- what would be better in this
case would be to tell rn to mark as read any posting that was sent to
"net.legal" that it finds here in net.flame. Can I do this? (I wouldn't
want to use a facility that just scans all the articles' text for the
string "net.legal", because I have no reason to kill an article which
MENTIONS the newsgroup "net.legal"; I would want it to only look at
the "Newsgroups:" field in this search.)

As I said, I think these facilities are there -- I just haven't figured
out how to utilize them.

Regards,
Will Martin

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