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139 responses total.

  Wow!  That must have taken some time to write up!  Good job!

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Annoying Unix question of the day:  I've been using trn to read usenet
news.  Great.  However, every time I quit trn, it saves a file called
'.oldnewsrc' which I always delete (to save disk space).  Is there a
command to put in my .login or .cshrc that would check to see if
'.oldnewsrc' exists and if so, rm it?  (I'd like this to be automatic).

I just have a "nohup rm .oldnewsrc &" command in my .logout file.
If I haven't read any news during the session, big deal, it gives a
"file not found" error message and keeps on going.

   Or another way is to put a
rm .newsrc
   in your .logout file....

You mean rm .oldnewsrc...I *want* my .newsrc to hand around (I don't
want to go through three hours of it asking me if I want to add such
and such a newsgroup).  I was hoping to find a way to do this that
avoids getting an error message when the file doesn't exist.

   (oh yeah... Oh well, you know what I mean :) )...
putting the rm .oldnewsrc doesn't give an error message when there isn't
one, I don't think... (I almost always run trn when I get on, so I'm not
sure if I'd know, but I don't think I've noticed it doing so...)... Even
if it does, it would come right before the NO CARRIER message, so it's not
like it's really annoying... and you could always redirect it to /dev/null...

If you're going to redirect it to /dev/null, I'm pretty sure it's 2>/dev/null
(stderr, not stdout).

(And either the redirection or a test for existence or a pre-creation is
indeed necessary if rm is not to give you a message.  Would you settle for
a line
>.oldnewsrc
which would create the file if it didn't exist but cut it to 0 bytes if it
did, instead of (or before) the rm?)

(I don't know...whatever works, I'm just not sure how to do it without
getting an error).

If you just do "rm .oldnewsrc" you'll get an error if it doesn't exist, but
as others noted the error shouldn't do any harm.  If you just don't want
to see error messages, "rm .oldnewsrc 2>/dev/null" will send any error
messages down the black hole.  This should be fine; in general I disapprove
a teeny little bit, as (if something truly weird were to happen) you wouldn't
see any other error messages either; but there *shouldn't* be any.  Or you
can just wipe the thing down to nothing with "> .oldnewsrc", or create/wipe
it & *then* delete it with "> .oldnewsrc;rm .oldnewsrc".

Any of these should work and be acceptable.

Thanks, I'll give those ideas a try.

Well...my experiences have been:  >.oldnewsrc gives an error about a bad
null (and doesn't create anything).  rm will delete .oldnewsrc but not
without asking me if I want to (even when I use the -f switch).  I tried
cp .newsrc .oldnewsrc and the rm .oldnewsrc, and that gives me a .oldnewsrc
to delete (although quite a bit bigger than 0 bytes!).  the 2>/dev/null
gives me an error, as does >/dev/null (the latter hangs). 
  I pretty puzzled why rm -f doesn't work.  Isn't -f supposed to override
the -i query?
  If rm would work like it's supposed to I could probably learn to ignore
the error...

Whata it says inthe manual ...
  
NAME
     rm, rmdir - remove (unlink) files or directories

SYNOPSIS
     rm [ -r ] [ -f ] [ -i ] [ - ] _^Hf_^Hi_^Hl_^He_^Hn_^Ha_^Hm_^He ...

DESCRIPTION
  Rm
     _^Hr_^Hm removes (directory entries for) one or more files.  If an
  
     -f   Force files to be removed  without  displaying  permis-
          sions, asking questions or reporting errors.
  
so kentn should expect rm to work as advertised, I would think ...

The only "error" I can think of would be if the file named did not
exist, then an error would be reported, but the manual tends to
say that nothing is reported if   -f    is used. Oh, well ...
it's unix.

Hm.  The null redirection apparently is only available in sh, not in csh.
(My apologies!!!).

I can't imagine what the problem with rm is, unless there are two versions
lurking on grex and your path is selecting the wrong one.
I would suggest that you do "type rm" to find out what you're getting, but
type is a builtin command in sh, & I don't think it works with csh.  For me,
rm is /bin/rm.

To cut it down to zero bytes, you might try "cp /dev/null .oldnewsrc".

Well, I guess I could open a Bourne sh and do those commands, but that
might make logging out a major multi-step process.  Anyway, I thought rm
was a part of Unix, not a part of the shell I'm using.  Does some systems
person have the -f parameter locked out for some reason?

Here's another command question:  where's tput?  There's a man entry
for it, but I can't find it (or make it run).

Kent - I have rm aliased in my .cshrc to 'rm -i', so it automatically
asks about deletions for every file.  Could you have this set up?

Personally, I wouldn't remove .oldnewsrc.  There have been times when,
for some reason, my .newsrc got munged and I needed .oldnewsrc to get back
into news without having to go through the whole list of groups and re-reading
the responses that I had already seen.  Sort of like an insurance policy.

Well, since it takes up about 26K, I though I'd get rid of it to help
ease the disk crunch.  If you people aren't worried about that, then
I'll leave it around.  As an alternative, I could compress it, but then
I'd still have the problem of deleting .oldnewsrc.  
  I don't think I have rm aliased as you say, but even if I do, the
manuals (and man) say that rm -f overrides -i, so rm -fi means -f takes
precedence.  Maybe I should just have .logout reply 'y'?

I personally hope you'll figure out what's going on & let me know - things
like this suggest that other problems may crop up.  (For one thing, what's
your path? if you don't mind posting it or mailing me.)

I assume you know it, but JIC: to do as you suggested:
echo y | rm .oldnewsrc
presumably ought to do it.

Kent, perhaps the best option is to go through and delete the newsgroups
you're not reading from your .newsrc.  When I did that, it went from
25K to 6K.  That'll end up saving more space than rm'ing your
.oldnewsrc, and if you want, you can always do both.

Good idea, robh.  I've been a bit leery of deleting something that I'll
later wish was there, so I haven't chopped the .newsrc down to size.
 
davel, I do have rm aliased as 'rm -i'.  I'll try unaliasing it and see
if the -f switch works.  If it does, then I'll be annoyed that it should
work even if rm is aliased...  I think my path is okay, at least rm is
working fine, except for the questioning I get from -i.  I'd really like
to leave -i in the alias because I do from time to time delete things
without thinking.

Thanks - I am glad to believe that the alias is the cause; I just would
have hated to find rm itself behaving in inconsistent ways.

   <<yeh, that woulda been, uh, tough ...>>

   <<or very entertaining...>>

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Interesting.  I didn't know about the backslash trick for overriding
aliases.

I found out on another system (MTS) that doing /usr/bin/rm -f fyle works,
so that seems to be along the same lines as popcorn suggests.  It's
good to know that there is a way to override aliases; thanks.

At least in sh (probably not in csh), you can indeed do a conditional on
one line.  To do what Valerie suggested (but with the full pathname specified
a la Kent's note):
if [ -f $HOME/.oldnewsrc ]; then /bin/rm $HOME/.oldnewsrc ; fi

The blanks after the "[" and before the "]" are mandatory, as are the
semicolons.  (As most of you know, the [ ] syntax is equivalent to using
test as Valerie did.  I find it easier to see what's happening.  I expect
the man on test gives the options; does on the SYSV I'm used to.

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Heh.  There's a file in /bin named '[' that's a link to 'test'.
(sh might also recognize the [] syntax internally)

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The problem I have now, is that I get an error back from the [] syntax
saying that I'm missing ], even though I'm not (as far as I can see).
The other form of the test command 'test ...' gives another error about
about (what I can't remember)...
  This is just a .logout file and it's not been changed to an execuble
or anything.  Does that make a difference?

Oh...it's "if: Expression syntax"  I've tried a lot of different ways
to enter the expression (multiple lines, combining lines, double checking
the man pages, every manual I have concerning test and if in a c-shell,
etc.) and had no luck.  Any ideas on what silly mistake I'm making?  Or
do you have a working version of the "if test...\rm .oldnewsrc  endif"
script?

Kent, if it's csh I'm out of my depth.  Sorry.  In sh you need some
semicolons and a then and it's fi not endif, but I *think* that's because
it's sh.

Valerie, at least on recent SYSV systems, the link approach is not used;
my impression (from something mju once said) is that that's a now-obsolete
approach ... .

One of my references said that it was 'endif' for csh, so that's why I
tried replacing 'fi' with that.  I've tried it both ways and neither
way works, so I doubt that that's the problem.

   I just have a rm .newsrc in my .logout, and I don't get any file not found
messages... Though I start up trn almost every time I get on..... :)

What and where is that file in which is listed the conferences I follow
automatically? I forgot.

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