[net.news] clever ruse

gwyn@brl-tgr.ARPA (Doug Gwyn <gwyn>) (12/08/84)

Ron Natalie thought of a clever way to get rid of the
annoying appending to "author_copy" that "postnews" does.
Plant a symbolic link called "author_copy" to /dev/null!

wls@astrovax.UUCP (William L. Sebok) (12/09/84)

> Ron Natalie thought of a clever way to get rid of the
> annoying appending to "author_copy" that "postnews" does.
> Plant a symbolic link called "author_copy" to /dev/null!

That reminds me of the time when we had two system managers here.  One got
annoyed about the other's long messages of the day.  He fixed it by making
/etc/motd a link to /dev/null.  Ever try to edit /dev/null?
-- 
Bill Sebok			Princeton University, Astrophysics
{allegra,akgua,burl,cbosgd,decvax,ihnp4,noao,princeton,vax135}!astrovax!wls

ekrell@ucla-cs.UUCP (12/12/84)

In article <6493@brl-tgr.ARPA> gwyn@brl-tgr.ARPA (Doug Gwyn <gwyn>) writes:
>Ron Natalie thought of a clever way to get rid of the
>annoying appending to "author_copy" that "postnews" does.
>Plant a symbolic link called "author_copy" to /dev/null!

  We just changed the code so that instead of appending to ~/author_copy
it would write it over. This way only the last message is kept in this
file. The change is very simple: just change the mode in the xfopen call
from "a" (append) to "w" (write).
-- 
    Eduardo Krell               UCLA Computer Science Department
    ekrell@ucla-locus.arpa      ..!{sdcrdcf,ihnp4,trwspp,ucbvax}!ucla-cs!ekrell