Subject: Re: How do I get a small list of newsgroups

From: [email-masked] (R. Stewart Ellis)
Date: 29 Jul 96 13:53:23 GMT

Paul O Bartlett <[email-masked]> writes:

 >On Sat, 27 Jul 1996, Clint Danbury wrote:

 >> How do I get the "folders" screen to show me just a few newsgroups ?  At
 >> present my option(s) is(are) to place the cursor on some message which
 >> says "press here to see the list" or something similar; which I do, and
 >> gen appears a list of 845,917 usenet newsgroups. [...]

 >    You did not say what system -- Un*x, DOS, Windoozy, whatever -- you
 >are using Pine under, so I will use the example of Un*x.  Pine uses
 >your .newsrc file.  Mine is quite small -- it has only the newsgroups
 >to which I am subscribed.  You might try this.  First, change to your
 >home directory.  THEN, MAKE A BACKUP COPY OF YOUR .NEWSRC FILE IN CASE
 >SOMETHING GOES WRONG.  Next, with a good text editor, simply delete the
 >entries for all the newsgroups (i.e., nearly all of them) that you
 >don't want.

 >    You could search for the names of all the groups that you do want
 >and move them all to the top of the file and delete everything else
 >below them.  Be sure to move the entire line in which the name occurs. 
 >Be aware that Pine will display the newsgroups in the folder collection
 >in the order in which they appear in the .newsrc file.  After you edit
 >out the zillion groups you don't want, Pine should show you only the
 >few groups you do want.

 >    Editing the .newsrc file by hand should be done with very great
 >care.  That's why you should make a backup copy first so you can back
 >out if things get messed up.

Many text editors have limits to the number of bytes, lines, or the length
of lines they will handle.  If you load a very large newsrc file into one of
these, you will lose entries.  Pico is one such editor, as is true for
MicroEMACS, jove, vi.  Editors that I know that have extremely large limits
are GNU Emacs and joe.

 >Paul                             <[email-masked]>
 >----------------------------------------------------------
 >Paul O. Bartlett, P.O. Box 857, Vienna, VA 22183-0857, USA
 >Finger, keyserver, or WWW for PGP 2.6.2 public key 
 >Home Page:  URL: http://www.access.digex.net/~pobart     

-- 
  R.Stewart(Stew) Ellis, Assoc.Prof., (Off)810-762-9765   ___________________
  Humanities & Social Science,  GMI Eng.& Mgmt.Inst. ()  /   _____  ______
  Flint, MI 48504    Free speech and free software!  /\ /        / /  /  / /
  Web admin:  http://www.gmi.edu/      [email-masked]   /________/ /  /  / /

---

From: Beth Peterson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 09:46:05 -0500

|
|How do I get the "folders" screen to show me just a few newsgroups ?  At

[email-masked]     Clint Danbury                          -

Have you tried using the unsubscribe command with in pine for the groups that
you don't want?

Beth Peterson
bethp@fnal
Physics Department