From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npoiv!npois!cbosgd!mark Newsgroups: net.misc Title: Re: Cryptic messages Article-I.D.: cbosgd.3135 Posted: Thu Feb 17 13:24:39 1983 Received: Tue Feb 22 07:52:30 1983 References: <196@watcgl.UUCP> "parse date string" is a combination of B news stretching the manual page slightly and USG UNIX not being very robust. What happens is, when you do a followup, it uses mktemp("/tmp/folXXXXXX") to create a temp file name to edit the followup in. Fine. Now, if you happen to do a SECOND followup in the same news session, it executes the same code. But since mktemp overwrites the argument in place, you have mktemp("/tmp/folA01234") which is not documented to work. It happens to work ok in 4.1BSD, but in USG it seems to clobber the null at the end, resulting in the string running over into the next character string in memory, which happens to be "Cannot parse date string". Thus, you get something along the lines of inews -t the real title < /tmp/folA012345Cannot parse date string and since the shell takes out the "< /tmp/folA012345Cannot" part, you are left with inews -t the real title parse date string 2.10 has been changed to copy the string literal into a temporary location and call mktemp on that temporary.