More Usenet questions

I'm new to the system and still quite green at all this. If i use Usenet
(no pun intended), is there anyway to surpress the creation of the
.newsrc file?  Or as an alternative to only create one that has the few
groups on it that I want to join. I used rm to remove the .newsrc when
Iwas done because it seems to take up a lot of diskspace.

18 responses total.

You can just use an editor (vi, bbsed, whatever, although bbsed may
screw up some of the long lines) to edit or create your .newsrc.
If you want to create one, it's just a list of newsgroups, each followed
by a colon or an exclamation point.  Newsgroups with a colon are
subscribed; newsgroups with an exclamation point are unsubscribed.
There's really no reason to keep unsubscribed groups in your .newsrc,
unless you plan to re-subscribe to them sometime in the near future
and don't want crossposts from other groups to show up when you do.

Thank you so much for your fast response, that's just what I wanted to know.

Also note that I just modified the "newsetup" script (which is what
creates your .newsrc if you don't have one) to only include the
following groups in the initial .newsrc: news.announce.newusers,
news.newusers.questions, and grex.*.  This should help reduce
newuser overload considerably.  If you want to have your .newsrc
recreated with just these groups, you can simply type "rm .newsrc"
and then run trn or rn again.

  Is there an easy way to find groups with such a .newsrc?  Ie: is there
another file that one can grep for search strings related to subjects one
is interested in?

Now I'm confused. If you've modified the newsetup script as you've said,
how do I ever get all of the groups back in my .newsrc, should something
happen to the one I have. I can easily imagine that I might try a brief
.newsrc, then later decide I want to check out all the groups again.
Will I be able to do this?

I do agree, however, that for a new user this will be an improvement.
I was blown away by all the groups when I started (a couple of weeks
ago).

You can use the "g" command in trn or rn to add a group to your
.newsrc.  Just type "g groupname"; if it's not in your .newsrc, trn
will ask you if you want to subscribe to it, and then where you
want to place it in your .newsrc.

There are a couple different files that hold the list of newsgroups.
/news/lib/active is the authoritative list, but it doesn't have any
descriptions.  /news/lib/newsgroups has descriptions, but may not
be up-to-date in any way (or even exist, since I'm somewhat slothful
about maintaining it).  There are various methods, both in and
out of trn, to get a list of newsgroups or search for groups based
on a pattern.

Another handy command is l (I think it means list). Say you're interested in
Macs, like I am. So you say "l mac". This causes trn to search through the
master list of newsgroups (marc says it's /news/lib/active) for any group
you're not subscribed to that has "mac" in its name. It then scans your
.newsrc for unsubscribed groups similarly. All these unsubscribed groups are
printed out for you, albeit without descriptions. Alternately you could use
"!grep mac /news/lib/active" and then "g groupname".

Quite often the name of the group is itself an adequate description,
such as "alt.tv.simpsons.itchy.scratch" or
"comp.sys.mac.arcane.icons".

I have another trn question: since the turnover rate is quite high, and since I
quite often see something I want to keep for referance (at least for a little
while) is there any way to save usenet stuff to a file for downloading?
I'm using a dumb terminal so I can't save it to my machine, more's the pity.

You can save any news item by typing s filename.  It will be saved in your
News directory here on Grex.  I use it all the time (especially for all the
nifty recipes in rec.food.cooking and rec.food.cooking.recipes).

Thanks, Glenda!

In thread-selection mode, you can mark the ones you want to save, and
then :s filename.  If the file doesn't exist, it asks you whether you
want it in mailbox mode.  Haven't experimented with what the other option
is.

What's the mailbox format?  Does it mail it to me?  Or is it an
organizational tool somehow?  I'm a little in the dark as to this feature.

"Mailbox format" means that each message begins with a "From_" line,
and successive messages in the file are separated with blank lines.
You can use a mail user agent (Elm, UCB Mail, etc.) to look at
a file in mailbox format, just as if it was your inbox.  The other
alternative (non-mailbox format) leaves off the From_ header, and
just concatenates the messages together.  That means you can't
use a mail user agent to read the messages in the file.

I use the mailbox format, and also notice that Usenet (or Unix?) will
notice that the filename is not created. This tends to indicate
that there will be *either* a concatonation *or* an overwrite if
teh filename *does* exist. I ahven't experimented with any options
but the questions arise nonetheless. Which is it?

Trn will figure out what format the file is currently in (through the
incredibly sophisticated AI algorithm of looking at the first line of
the file, and seeing if it begins with "From"), and will append the
message in the proper format.

<smile>

Append - good to know that,thankxx

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