From: utzoo!henry Newsgroups: net.news Title: net.sources and other problems Article-I.D.: utzoo.2765 Posted: Thu Jan 20 21:05:48 1983 Received: Thu Jan 20 21:05:48 1983 Dave Clemans makes an excellent point: news/uucp is not really a 100% reliable mechanism. It can be much improved by one trick I mentioned some time ago: make your "rnews" not a link to inews but a shellfile which reports errors to somewhere where humans will read them. Like this: : '@(#)rnews 1.6 of 16 Dec 82' PATH=/bin:/usr/bin ; export PATH tee /tmp/rn$$ | rnewsb >/tmp/rnm$$ 2>&1 if test -s /tmp/rnm$$ && grep -s -v '^Duplicate article ' then ( echo rnews ; cat /tmp/rnm$$ ; \ echo ----- ; cat /tmp/rn$$ ; echo ----- ) | mail uucp fi rm -f /tmp/rn$$ /tmp/rnm$$ (SCCS id in a comment, standardize PATH, tee the article into a tempfile as you feed it to the "real" rnews and route error messages from same into another tempfile, then check to see if you got any error messages [ignoring "Duplicate article"], and if so, mail the messages and the article text to a human-read mailbox.)