Path: ns-mx!uunet!ftpbox!mothost!white!sapphire.rtsg.mot.com!orchid3!king From: king@orchid3.rtsg.mot.com (Steven King, Software Archaeologist) Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions Subject: Re: how do you set up an auto topic selector Message-ID: <1991Dec18.150311.3777@rtsg.mot.com> Date: 18 Dec 91 15:03:11 GMT References: <64065@ut-emx.uucp> Sender: news@rtsg.mot.com Reply-To: king@orchid3.rtsg.mot.com Distribution: na Organization: Motorola Inc., Cellular Infrastructure Group, Arlington Hgts IL Lines: 64 Nntp-Posting-Host: orchid3 charlieb@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Charlie Blake) scribes: >If I wanted everything out of comp.sys.mac.apps that had the word "word" >in it, what would I do? The answer is, of course, to RTFM, but since the manual can be rather obscure about some of this I'll give the the quick-and-dirty. Sounds like you want a KILL file. The 'rn' man page has a large section on KILL files, and there's a KILL file frequently asked questions list floating around that will give you a hand. KILL files are rather poorly named, 'cause they can do more than just kill articles. They can run any 'rn' command on an article, not just "junk" (kill this article). 'rn' has a command to pipe the current article to another Unix program. Unix has a 'mail' program. Do you see the possibilities here? Try making a KILL file with a line like this -- /word/a:j:s | mail -s "Article from comp.sys.mac.apps" charlieb The parts of the line -- /word/a Select articles that contain "word" anywhere. See the man page for info about restricting the search to message headers or subject lines. j When an article is found, junk it so it doesn't show up when you read news via 'rn'. (It's being mailed to you, why bother to read it twice?) s | mail Save the article, but instead of saving it to a file send it to the 'mail' program. (The bar is the standard Unix pipe symbol.) -s "Article from comp.sys.mac.apps" This is an option to 'mail' to set the subject line. In this case, the subject of the mail message will be "Article from comp.sys.mac.apps" charlieb This parameter of 'mail' tells who to send the message to. Naturally you want to send it to yourself. The biggest problem you might have is that the 'mail' program on your machine may not be like the 'mail' program on my machine. It may have different options to set the subject, or whatever. Read the 'mail' man page before you start to make sure it'll work for you. 'rn' KILL files are only executed when you're running 'rn'. So, to get the stuff mailed to you you'll have to run 'rn' periodically and read comp.sys.mac.apps to get the KILL file executed. I think I once saw an offline program that would execute KILL files from outside the newsreader (say, as a 'cron' job) but I don't know where that got to. -- -------------------------------------------------------+----------------------- 2 + 2 = 5 for sufficiently large values of 2. | Steven King | Motorola Cellular | king@rtsg.mot.com