[net.news.group] New Readnews -- an idea for a command

johnc@dartvax.UUCP (John Cabell) (02/04/84)

  Re: the new Readnews

  If possible, there should be a command to update '.newsrc'
and pretend you've read all the articles, maybe in a newsgroup
so that if, for some reason, you exit readnews without updating
.newsrc and you don't want to have to type 'n' to all the art-
icles, you cant type 'c' (or something else) and delete the
in that particular newsgroup.

Just an idea,
--johnc

dman@homxa.UUCP (#D.ANDERSON) (02/06/84)

Here at the hocc I implemented a command that updates the .newsrc to the
currently oldest articles on the machine. It seemed in our 2.10, if a new
user started reading netnews, a group with many articles (like unix wizards)
would take forever to get into - it was trying to find the first N articles.
I do some of the work each night when the spool directories are cleaned, and
some when the user invokes the command. Also whenever a new user executes
readnews, if a .newsrc can not be found the default is copied in. Readnews
runs real fast this way for us.

This is fairly quick to change into an 'update to currently recieved news'
program. Most of it is in shell (written quick and dirty) and easily
modifiable. If there is interest, maybe I can post it to the net.


				Dave Anderson  (201) 949-5552