From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!floyd!trb
Newsgroups: net.news
Title: bogus newsgroup causes expansion of .newsrc
Article-I.D.: floyd.548
Posted: Wed Sep 15 16:39:21 1982
Received: Thu Sep 16 01:47:59 1982

A few weeks ago, someone kludged together a bogus news article
(presumably without using inews) to the nonexistent newsgroup
"net.jokes net.general" and it seems that readnews (2.9) doesn't
treat it rationally.

I had 135 lines in my .newsrc which all read:

net.jokes net.general: 1

All netnews administrators should remove the group "net.jokes
net.general" from their active files.

IMPORTANT NOTE:  I am not talking about the two groups net.jokes and
net.general.  I am talking about a single newsgroup whose name contains
a space as one of the characters in its name: "net.jokes net.general."
Do not delete the valid groups net.jokes or net.general.

Many people's .newsrc files will have several lines which contain the
bogus notation mentioned above.  When I was running netnews with 135 of
these bogus lines, it was wasting about two cpu seconds per run looking
for news items in these groups.  Use the following commands to remove
these lines:

$ cd
$ grep -v " n" .newsrc > $$
$ mv $$ .newsrc
$

	Andy Tannenbaum   Bell Labs  Whippany, NJ   (201) 386-6491