packer@chrpserv.gsfc.nasa.gov (Charles Packer) (12/13/89)
I would like to get all the unread articles from selected newsgroups into a text file (or files) for processing by another application. This is easy to do interactively, but I want to do it in =batch= mode because I don't want to sit at the keyboard all day entering ".-$ s" for each newsgroup and waiting while its messages are written one by one. I asked our Sun systems administrators if I could just copy all the news files without going through rn, but they believe that it can't be done because the files are on a server, not on the user machine. Beyond that, they couldn't help me. The obvious way to me to do it, as a VAXian, is to write a command procedure, or "script" as it's called in Unix, which invokes rn and feeds it all the commands that I would ordinarily do interactively. But such a script bombs with an error message: "Caught a SIGSEGV-- .newsrc restored." I suspect it has something to do with the fact that rn runs in "cbreak mode." What to do?