Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!purdue!gatech!ncar!woods
From: woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: rn in Followup
Keywords: rn L4
Message-ID: <564@ncar.ucar.edu>
Date: 11 Aug 88 06:31:47 GMT
References: <228@ssbn.WLK.COM>
Reply-To: woods@handies.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods)
Distribution: na
Organization: Scientific Computing Division/NCAR, Boulder CO
Lines: 25

In article <228@ssbn.WLK.COM> bill@ssbn.WLK.COM (Bill Kennedy) writes:
>few moments after I hit the `s' to Send, I'll get something that
>looks like stderr on the status line of the next article
>
>sh: L4 not found
>
>Does anyone know what that is or how to stop it? 

  Since I just finished tearing my hair out for a month or so over something
similar to this, I got a pretty good guess.  The problem isn't in rn, it's
in your sys file (usually /usr/lib/news/sys) More than likely you have a syntax
error there (from the "L4" I'm guessing you've got one too many colons on
one of the lines). I ran into something similar when I'd see

sh: /usr/spool/batch/husc6.harvard.edu not found

It turned out to be that I had converted over to sending only locally-generated
articles to this site, and had turned the flag field from "F" to "L2". 
Unfortunately this changed the meaning of the last field in the sys file,
so it was now trying to execute the batch file as a command. (I wanted
"L2F" of course). In this case if you've got one too many colons, the default
is "L" in the flag field, and you might have what you thought was the flag
field "L4" trying to be executed as a command.

--Greg