nngoback(1) [debian man page]
NNGOBACK(1) General Commands Manual NNGOBACK(1) 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 4th Berkeley Distribution Release 6.6 NNGOBACK(1)
Check Out this Related Man Page
EXPIRE.CTL(5) File Formats Manual EXPIRE.CTL(5) NAME expire.ctl - control file for Usenet article expiration DESCRIPTION The file /etc/news/expire.ctl is the default control file for the expire(8) program, which reads it at start-up. Blank lines and lines beginning with a number sign (``#'') are ignored. All other lines should be in one of two formats. The first format specifies how long to keep a record of fully-expired articles. This is useful when a newsfeed intermittently offers older news that is not kept around very long. (The case of very old news is handled by the ``-c'' flag of innd(8).) There should only be one line in this format, which looks like this: /remember/:days Where days is a floating-point number that specifies the upper limit to remember a Message-ID, even if the article has already expired. (It does not affect article expirations.) Most of the lines in the file will consist of five colon-separated fields, as follows: pattern:modflag:keep:default:purge The pattern field is a list of wildmat(3)-style patterns, separated by commas. This field specifies the newsgroups to which the line is applied. Note that the file is interpreted in order, so that the last line that matches will be used. This means that general patterns (like a single asterisk to set the defaults) should appear before specific group specifications. The modflag field can be used to further limit newsgroups to which the line applies, and should be chosen from the following set: M Only moderated groups U Only unmoderated groups A All groups The next three fields are used to determine how long an article should be kept. Each field should be either a number of days (fractions like ``8.5'' are allowed) or the word ``never.'' The most common use is to specify the default value for how long an article should be kept. The first and third fields -- keep and purge -- specify the boundaries within which an Expires header will be honored. They are ignored if an article has no Expires header. The fields are specified in the file as ``lower-bound default upper-bound,'' and they are explained in this order. Since most articles do not have explicit expiration dates, however, the second field tends to be the most impor- tant one. The keep field specifies how many days an article should be kept before it will be removed. No article in the newsgroup will be removed if it has been filed for less then keep days, regardless of any expiration date. If this field is the word ``never'' then an article cannot have been kept for enough days so it will never be expired. The default field specifies how long to keep an article if no Expires header is present. If this field is the word ``never'' then articles without explicit expiration dates will never be expired. The purge field specifies the upper bound on how long an article can be kept. No article will be kept longer then the number of days spec- ified by this field. All articles will be removed after then have been kept for purge days. If purge is the word ``never'' then the arti- cle will never be deleted. It is often useful to honor the expiration headers in articles, especially those in moderated groups. To do this, set keep to zero, default to whatever value you wish, and purge to never. To ignore any Expires header, set all three fields to the same value. There must be exactly one line with a pattern of ``*'' and a modflags of ``A'' -- this matches all groups and is used to set the expiration default. It should be the first expiration line. For example, ## How long to keep expired history /remember/:5 ## Most things stay for two weeks *:A:14:14:14 ## Believe expiration dates in moderated groups, up to six weeks *:M:1:30:42 ## Keep local stuff for a long time foo.*:A:30:30:30 HISTORY Written by Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews. This is revision 1.15, dated 1996/10/29. SEE ALSO expire(8), wildmat(3). EXPIRE.CTL(5)