102 Snoozenet I was just trying to catch up on a few hundred unread messages in a newsgroup using rn. I watch the header pop up, and if the subject isn’t interesting I type “k” for the kill command. This says “marking subject foo as read” and marks all unread messages with the same subject as having been read. So what happens... I see a message pop up with subject "*******", and type “k.” Yep—it marks ALL messages as being read. No way to undo it. Total lossage. Screwed again. —mkl rn commands are a single letter, which is a fundamental problem. Since there are many commands some of the assignments make no sense. Why does “f” post a followup, and what does followup mean, anyway? One would like to use “r” to post a reply, but that means send reply directly to the author by sending mail. You can’t use “s” for mail because that means save to a file, and you can’t use “m” for mail because that means “mark the article as unread.” And who can decipher the jargon to really know what that means? Or, who can really remember the difference between “k”, “K”, “^K”, “.^K”, and so on? There is no verbose mode, the help information is never complete, and there is no scripting language. On the other hand, “it certainly seems faster.” Like all programs, rn has had its share of bugs. Larry introduced the idea of distributing fixes using a formalized message containing the “diff” out- put. This said: here’s how my fixed code is different from your broken code. Larry also wrote patch, which massages the old file and the descrip- tion of changes into the new file. Every time Larry put out an official patch (and there were various unofficial patches put out by “helpful” people at times), sites all over the world applied the patch and recompiled their copy of rn. Remote rn, a variant of rn, read news articles over a network. It’s interest- ing only because it required admins to keep two nearly identical programs around for a while, and because everyone sounded like a seal when they said the name, rrn. trn, the latest version of rn, has merged in all the patches of rn and rrn and added the ability to group articles into threads. A thread is a collection of articles and responses, and trn shows the “tree” by putting a little dia- gram in the upper-right corner of the screen as its reading. For example:

rn, trn: You Get What You Pay for 103 +[1]-[1]-(1) \-[2]-[*] | +-[1] +-[5] +[3] -[2] No, we don’t know what it means either, but there are Unix weenies who swear by diagrams like this and the special nonalphabetic keystrokes that “manipulate” this information. The rn family is highly customizable. On the other hand, only the true anal-compulsive Unix weenie really cares if killfiles are stored as $HOME/News/news/group/name/KILL, ~/News.Group.Name, $DOTDIR/K/news.group.name There are times when this capability (which had to be shoehorned into an inflexible environment by means of “% strings” and “escape sequences”) reaches up and bites you: Date: Fri, 27 Sep 91 16:26:02 EDT From: Robert E. Seastrom rs@ai.mit.edu To: UNIX-HATERS Subject: rn bites weenie So there I was, wasting my time reading abUsenet news, when I ran across an article that I thought I'd like to keep. RN has this handy lit- tle feature that lets you pipe the current article into any unix program, so you could print the article by typing “| lpr” at the appropriate time. Moveover, you can mail it to yourself or some other lucky person by typing “| mail jrl@fnord.org” at the same prompt. Now, this article that I wanted to keep had direct relevance to what I do at work, so I wanted to mail it to myself there. We have a UUCP connection to uunet (a source of constant joy to me, but that's another flame...), but no domain name. Thus, I sent it to “rs%dead- lock@uunet.uu.net.” Apparently %d means something special to rn, because when I went to read my mail several hours later, I found this in my mailbox: Date: Fri, 27 Sep 91 10:25:32 -0400 From: MAILER-DAEMON@uunet.uu.net (Mail Delivery Subsystem)