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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!agate!agate!usenet
From: wkt@cserve.cs.adfa.oz.au (Warren Toomey)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.announce
Subject: bsdnews on minnie: a man page
Followup-To: poster
Date: 30 Dec 1993 05:07:16 -0800
Organization: ADFA, Canberra, Australia
Lines: 109
Sender: cgd@agate.berkeley.edu
Approved: 386bsd-announce-request@agate.berkeley.edu
Message-ID: <9312290124.AA03834@cserve.cs.adfa.oz.au>
NNTP-Posting-Host: agate.berkeley.edu
Summary: Finally, a man page for the bsdnews program
Keywords: comp.os.386bsd, news, archive, telnet, minnie
Merry Xmas, Happy New Year etc. I've altered the bsdnews news interface
on minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au yet again; see the SORT variable below for
details. I've finally written a man page for the program, it's below.
Have a good one!
Warren wkt@csadfa.cs.adfa.oz.au
bsdnews(1L) MISC. REFERENCE MANUAL PAGES bsdnews(1L)
NAME
bsdnews - user interface to *BSD news archive
SYNOPSIS
bsdnews
DESCRIPTION
bsdnews is a user interface to a *BSD news archive. The
interface allows you to search the subject lines of the news
for keywords, and then to read some/all of the articles you
found.
The user accesses the program by telnetting to the machine
minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au, logging in as bsdnews. She/he then
interacts with it by giving it lines of commands. The follow-
ing commands are available:
help [command]
- gives explicit help on the named command, or a short
synopsis of the available commands.
? [command]
- the same as help.
grep [-i] egrep_pattern
- search the *BSD news subject lines for the given egrep
pattern. The result is displayed on the screen with
either less or cat, depending on the value of the PAGER
variable; see Environment Variables for more details.
mail email_address
- mail the result of the last grep or read to the given
email address.
prog [-i] egrep_pattern
- the same as grep.
read article
- read the contents of the requested article. The arti-
cle is a decimal number, given in the left-most column
of the grep results. The result is displayed on the
screen with either less or cat, depending on the value
of the PAGER variable.
quit
- exit the program.
set [variable [value] ]
- set the named variable to the given value. If the
value is not given, the value 1 is used. If both vari-
able and value are omitted, the list of variables and
their values is printed.
unset variable
- remove the named variable from the list of set vari-
ables.
ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
The operation of bsdnews is affected by certain variables
and their values. These variables are:
PATH
- the path used to find the following programs: egrep,
sed, cat, cp, sort, rm, gunzip, tar and the pager used.
PAGER
- if unset, the result of a grep or read is sent
directly to the screen. If set, a pager is used to show
the result one page at a time; the default pager is
less.
LESS
- if less is the default pager, this variable controls
its operation. See the manual page for less for more
details.
TERM
- most pagers need to know the type of terminal being
used. This variable should be set to your terminal type.
LAST
- if set, and you have done a grep and then a read, the
grep is redisplayed after you have finished reading the
article. This allows you to continue browsing through
your search after reading each article.
SORT
- this variable takes one of two values, date and sub-
ject. If unset or set to subject, the result of a grep
is sorted according to the contents of the subject lines
found. If set to date, the result of a grep is sorted
according to the article numbers found, which gives a
roughly chronological sorting.
SEE ALSO
last(1L), egrep(1)