donn (06/04/82)
I long ago became irritated with the scrolling problems which
"readnews" has when it pipes its output through "more" and wondered if
I couldn't do better with my own news interface. I have cooked up a
cshell script which runs quickly and depends entirely on "more" for its
interface. Thus I can use all the familiar ":p" and ":n" commands to
walk through the list of articles and get the shell escapes and so on.
Since it is built of (metaphorically) spit, string and old coat hangers
it has disadvantages, the most costly of which is the inability to stop
in the middle of a news reading session and pick it up again at the
next login. It would be quite simple to modify the script so that it
patched two other problems--it goes through the list of articles in "A
news" fashion, in the order which articles arrived; and it doesn't
allow selectivity in newsgroups. These don't bother me very much since
I don't care what order I read newspapers in and my tastes are rather
catholic (and I have a swift finger for skipping articles!). I have
been using this interface for several months and have found it much
more satisfactory than my previous few weeks with "readnews"... Here
is the news reading script, which should be used by aliasing csh -f
scriptname to readnews:
#
# Cshell script to read news with "more". Uses /usr/lib/news/history.
#
onintr err
echo "/^`tail -1 /usr/lib/news/history | sed -e 's/\//\\\//g'`"'$/,$s/^.* //p' > ~/newnews
cd /usr/spool/news
more `sed -n -f ~/lastnews /usr/lib/news/history` /dev/null
cd ~
mv lastnews oldnews
mv newnews lastnews
err:
exit
Here is a script that checks for new news:
#
# Look for new news.
#
cd ~/c
if { fgrep -s `tail -1 /usr/lib/news/history | sed -e 's/ .*$//'` lastnews } then
echo No news.
else
echo There is news.
endif