NNGOBACK(1) UNIX System V (Release 6.5) 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.
Page 1 (printed 1/11/99)
NNGOBACK(1) UNIX System V (Release 6.5) NNGOBACK(1)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
Page 2 (printed 1/11/99)
