I am desperately seeking an Idiot's Guide to trn as I am totally
totally LOST! Any info please e-mail me directly! Thanks!

take6@grex.cyberspace.org

34 responses total.

Hit 'h' at any trn prompt.

And there's always "write help", I know a fair amount about trn.

I **do** hit 'h'. I never understand any of that stuff. Sometimes when I
log on I see messages I've already read, or messages that are a week
old. I don't understand this "thread" business at all. And I don't seem
to be able to post! After I wrote a post, it said "access denied" or
something to that effect. Any help would be much appreciated!!

Non-members can not post to Usenet from grex.  Type "!support" at the next
prompt for membership information.  If you don't want to threads, use "rn"
instead of "trn".  rn is the same program as trn, but it does not do
threads.  "tin" is another news reader that you might want to try.

You don't have to thread in trn. Anway, the most important simple
commands (I think) are:  g <newsgroup name>, to join a newsgroup;
   =    (to see a list of article titles, before reading any); 
entering the number of an article you want to read;  c   to mark all
items in that newsgroup as read. If you want to enter a response in
that newsgroup, before doing a    q   to leave it, enter    f. 
(Whooee.. did I mis-remember anything?)

I'd strongly suggest doing     man trn    and capturing the output and
printing it.  I was completely lost when faced with only the online help,
but one leisurely browse through the man gave me my bearings.  I've
now forgotten most of it, since I really don't do anything much, but
I think I listed about 3 or 4 things to do at each point in the program.

I would strongly recommend against tin.  It's said to be a truly incredible
memory hog, slowing down you and everyone else on the system if only a
couple of people are using it at any given time.

man trn is 50 pages long. I can invoke Save Stream and let it loose, but
my pager will stick in a --more-- for every screen. Dave, how can I
disable that temporarily, so I can save the whole output without
interruptions?

Man gets pager from the environment somehow.  I think that 

setenv PAGER cat 

should get rid of more until you 

setenv PAGER more

Or you can use an output-direction thingy, more commonly known as
a >

I.e., rcurl, you can run this Unix command:

        man trn > trnmanual

And then download the file "trnmanual" as you would a normal file.
You can even "cat trnmanual" and do it as a text capture.

Oh yeah.  And how about a pipe:
 
 man trn | cat

 man trn | sz

Wouldn't you need to somehow tell sz to take its input from stdin?  Maybe
man trn | sz -         ?  Or is it smart (or dumb) enough to assume that
if stdin isn't a tty it's the data?  (I know, RTFM.)

Jeff, I don't really know csh, but can't you unset PAGER or something
like that rather than resetting it to cat?  Not much difference in the
long run.

If you go to look at the output of what Rob suggested (which is the way
I usually do it myself) you'll see all sorts of _^H things, which are supposed
to make more or less do emphasis of some kind and underline on a lot of
printers.  You can edit out all those things at one whack with vi, if you
don't want them:
:%s/_^V^H//g
is the command.  (You actually type control-V control-H.)  Or you could
pipe it through sed or something with some similar command, I think.
Occasionally there are other overprinted things, too - scan for control-H
if you need to.

or you can say      man trn | col -b >yourfile
col -b will cleverly remove all of the ^H thingies.

If the output is going to a tty and PAGER is not set, man will usually
default to "more".  In this case, you really do have to explicitly
set PAGER to "cat" or pipe man's output through cat.  (Man might
have a switch to tell it "no pager", but it's a lot easier to remember 
"man | cat" than it is to remember which systems have the flag, and
what the flag is.)

ROTFL! Well, I'll go back over that, and see if I can figure out if
there is a clear instruction there on how to Save Stream without
breaks. I usually just more files and Save Selection, but this one
might exceed my buffer (which I could expand). Or, as a last resort,
I'd download. Its marvelous having all these alternatives... ;-).

I ran a    man trn | cat, with Save Stream on, which did save the file
to my computer, but there are random errors in line lengths/format. I
think I'm going to have to save it to a file, and do a regular download.
So what would that be?  man trn | cat > trnmanual   ?

To get rid of the backspacing and whatnot, you probably want
        man trn | col -b >trn.man

And in general: if you're redirecting a process's output to a file, just
proces > file - no need to do   process | cat > file.

I ran a   man trn | col -b , with Save Stream on, and that did the
trick. Format appears to have been preserved. Would you please explain
what the filters cat or col -b do, and why one worked and not the
other? (Dave, re#17 - don't I want to include the filter in the
process I want to save to file? That was the original problem. To
turn off the pager, and apparently some other stuff.)

Cat simply displays the contents of a file to the screen.  The name is
short for concatinate because the same program can be used to combine
files.  Piping somehting through cat is redundant, however, specifying cat
as a pager will force other programs to simply dump the file instead of
going through a pager that processes the text.  Any pipe or redirection
would cause man to forget about its pager. 

If you man trn | cat to many printers, the _^H sequences would print
the underscore character, move the carrage back one space, and print
the next letter.  This is (was) a good way to underline.  Pagers like
more, less, and (I gather from context) col know about this trick and
take characters that should be underlined and try to sent them to your
terminal underlined or in a different color or something.

And col removes "goofy" control characters.  The -b tells it to
get rid of the backspace, which it would normally leave alone.
Looks like col is meant particularly to remove reverse linefeeds
and vertical tabs that are sometimes sent in files intended for
printing. 

I tried to find again the lists of Newsgroups, Alt-Newgroups, Gateways and
Moderators, that I had found in news.announce.newusers. They were articles
#538 to 544. However, I now find only one article in news.announce.newusers
(#636), after using  U   to unread what I had read. Can I recover those
articles, or have they disappeared into limbo? (I don't need them myself,
but I wanted to refer a newuser to them.)

Probably they've hit the great bit bucket in the sky as far as Grex is
concerned.  You might try reading just that group at UM, where it seems
they keep news around a lot longer that a system like Grex can afford to.
Also, if they are FAQ-type files, they might be at rtfm.mit.edu.

I thought I recalled that when I ran trn for the *first* time, I was
fed news.announce.newusers, which has this stuff newusers need (including
Etiquette, etc). What group (if any) are newusers provided now, to help
them start?

Rename your .newsrc to something other than .oldnewsrc, run trn or tin
and find out    :)

Good idea. Did that, and in a brief intro, there appears:

o  If you have never used the news system before, you may find the articles
     in news.announce.newusers to be helpful.

Did that too, but there wasn't anything there (here), except one article
I mentioned before. 

Grex appears to not be the best place for the present for newusers to
learn to use usenet.

Well, I liked how trn started up for me recently compared to last year.
This year, I defined a few groups with my editor and saved them in
.newsrc.  Last year, you got bombarded by "Subscribe to group X?"
questions (one for every newsgroup!).  It took hours to say "no" to
some and "yes" to others.

When I started (here), all that newsgroup info was in news.announce.newusers,
and I downloaded it all, so I have it on hand (and can search newsgroups
for keywords). The list one gets with the command  l  is not as useful, as
it omits the brief descriprtions in the major lists.

I usually grep my .newsrc from inside trn, though that doesn't give
any description of the groups.
 
Check out rtfm.mit.edu /pub/usenet-by-group/news.answers/news-newusers-intro
It has pointers to a lot of what your asking for.  Then you can download
it again for fun.
 
Actually, I think you are looking for several periodic postings.  If
you happen to miss them in the several days they are on Grex, they
should reappear again soon.  Also try news.answers and news.lists.
They are two other groups where such information is periodically posted.
Most anything of a periodic and important nature (like FAQs and
Emily Postnews ;) are at rtfm.mit.edu.  

Hmmm...rtfm sounds very familiar. I may have gotten the files from there!
However I do recall being presented with an (overwhelming) mass of stuff
in news.announce.newusers when I first ran rn. Thanks for posting that
address, though.

There are several introduction to usenet articles that I pulled down from
rtfm which you can access on grex.  Take a look at the directory 

/usr/local/inet/Usenet

I did find that I had rtfm.mit.edu in my Fetch directory, so I must have
ftp'd some of my usenet info files from there. Brain overload must have
occurred. 

After using trn for some time, I tried tin and liked its somewhat friendlier
interface. However I could not figure out how to search backward for an
article I had read in a previous session on tin. In trn, its ?keyword?r,
but all I could find in tin was the command to search in the current
group. Is there a wider search command in tin? [What I did, of course,
was leave tin, enter trn, and did the search successfully.]

In tin, if you type "l" (lower case ell) when the cursor is pointing
to a particular thread, this will a bring up a menu listing all
articles belonging to the thread that are still on the news server,
including articles that you've already read. You can then go back
and re-read them.
   That's probably only a partial solution to your problem.

Yes - the thread was not in the current group when I wanted to search
backwards. However "l" looks like it at least escapes from the
current group. I do not recall seeing it (or perhaps understanding it)
when I studied the command lists.

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