bstempleton@watmath.UUCP (Brad Templeton) (07/16/83)
Netnews actually pays attention to the dot in group names, although this is somewhat beyond what the original design indicated. Essentiall, in shell terms, if you ask for a group, you in fact get both group and group.*, or in net terms, group and group.all, where all, like * will match any arbitrary string in a group name. (all was chosen since the shell already interprets * and the authors didn't want to force news readers to quote newsgroups names on the command line. (In my opinion, this was a mistake. You rarely use the "all" pattern matching on the command line, but rather keep it in the .newsrc file. For the times you want it, you could have quoted *. After all, people are used to quoting that anyway for grep.) ) Thus asking for "net" gets you group "net", which is not actually used as a group, and net.all. The point is that "net", while not a group, IS a distribution code, but as far as news is concerned, distribution codes and newsgroups are the same. The only distinction is that people post things to newsgroups while they don't post to distribution codes. So your sys file should read: site:net,fa,ug,btl:B or whatever for the distributions you deal with. This works, I can assure you of it, so DON'T TRY TO USE NET.TEST to test it. You got this article by the following sys file from my sys file: (One of them, actually) decvax:to.decvax,net:L utzoo:net,ont,can,ug,to.utzoo:U And it has been this way since 2.7 at least, and this has worked in every version since A news as far as I can recall. -- Brad Templeton - Waterloo, Ont. (519) 886-7304