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