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.)