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)