NAME¶
nngoback - make news articles unread on a day-by-day basis (nn)
SYNOPSIS¶
nngoback [ -
NQvi ] [-
d]
days [
group ]...
DESCRIPTION¶
nngoback will rewind the .newsrc record file of
nn(1) one or more
days. It can be used to rewind all groups, or only a specified set of
groups. In other words,
nngoback can mark news articles which
have arrived on the system during the last
days days unread.
Only
subscribed groups that occur in the current presentation sequence
are rewound. That means that if no
group arguments are specified, all
groups occurring in the sequence defined in the
init file will be
rewound. Otherwise, only the groups specified on the argument line will be
rewound.
When a group is rewound, the information about selections, partially read
digests etc. are discarded. It will print notifications about this unless the
-
Q (quiet) option is used.
If the -
i (interactive) option is specified,
nngoback will report
for each how many articles
can be marked unread, and ask for
confirmation before going back in that group.
If the -
v (verbose) option is specified,
nngoback will report how
many articles are marked unread.
If the -
N (no-update) option is specified,
nngoback will perform
the entire goback operation, but not update the .newsrc file.
If you are not up-to-date with your news reading, you can also use
nngoback to catch up to only have the last few days of news waiting to
be read in the following way:
nn -a0
nngoback 3
The
nn command will mark all articles in all groups as read (answer
all to the catch-up question.) The following
nngoback will then
make the last three days of news unread again.
Examples:
- nngoback 0
- Mark the articles which have arrived today as unread.
- nngoback 1
- Mark the articles which have arrived yesterday and today as unread.
- nngoback 6
- Mark the articles which have arrived during the last week as unread.
You cannot go more than 14 days back with
nngoback. (You can change this
limit as described below.)
THE BACK_ACT DAEMON¶
It is a prerequisite for the use of
nngoback that the script
back_act is executed at an appropriate time once (and only once) every
day. Preferably this is done by
cron right before the bacth of news for
`today' is received.
back_act will maintain copies of the active file
for the last 14 days.
Optionally, the
back_act program accepts a single numerical argument
specifying how many copies of the active file it should maintain. This is
useful if news is expired after 7 days, in which case keeping more than 7 days
of active file copies is wasteful.
FILES¶
~/.newsrc The record of read articles.
~/.newsrc.goback The original rc file before goback.
$db/active.
N The
N days `old' active file.
$master/back_act Script run by cron to maintain old active files.
SEE ALSO¶
nn(1),
nncheck(1),
nngrab(1),
nngrep(1),
nnpost(1),
nntidy(1)
nnadmin(1M), nnusage(1M),
nnmaster(8)
NOTES¶
nngoback does not check the age of the `old' active files; it will
blindly believe that active.0 was created today, and that active.7 is really
seven days old! Therefore, the
back_act script should be run once and
only once every day for
nngoback to work properly.
The days are counted relative to the time the active files were copied.
AUTHOR¶
Kim F. Storm, Texas Instruments A/S, Denmark
E-mail: storm@texas.dk