Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site watcgl.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!watcgl!dmmartindale From: dmmartindale@watcgl.UUCP (Dave Martindale) Newsgroups: net.news,net.unix Subject: Re: readnews questions Message-ID: <2212@watcgl.UUCP> Date: Wed, 7-Mar-84 23:14:28 EST Article-I.D.: watcgl.2212 Posted: Wed Mar 7 23:14:28 1984 Date-Received: Thu, 8-Mar-84 19:22:06 EST References: <346@denelcor.UUCP> Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario Lines: 23 The U command itself takes almost no time. But finding the first article in the next group may take a long time indeed if it is a group you haven't been reading regularly. Readnews looks for articles in ascending sequence one at a time. If the next group is net.unix-wizards and the first unexpired article on your machine is number 5000, and you haven't read anything in this group before, it will look for article 1, then 2, then 3, until it finally gets to 5000. You may wait a long time. A quick-and-dirty fix is to grep unix-wizards in /usr/lib/news/active; the number is the highest-received article to date; say it's 6000. Then find the unix-wizards line in your .newsrc and alter it to read net.unix-wizards: 1-5900 Ugh. I believe someone posted some code to deal with this, but we don't have it installed here either. A reasonable way to handle this is to have readnews read the directory, build a bit map of articles which do exist, invert the map to become a set of articles which don't exist, and then or this into the bit map obtained from the user's .newsrc so that all the non-existent articles appear to have been read. I don't have time to implement it though. Dave Martindale