Finding That Newsgroup on UNIX

Finding your way around the almost 3,500 (and growing!) Usenet/Netnews newsgroups the Computer Center carries can be daunting. Don't dismay. The "newsreaders" on CMS and on the ADN UNIX systems provide many ways to help you find the groups that particularly interest you and to avoid the groups that you particularly don't want to see.

• Getting started reading the news
• First, a quick course in using tin
• Finding interesting groups

They're very different in the way they work, but they do use the same default subscription list (in a file named ~/.newsrc), so you can go from one to the other without difficulty. That being the case, the easiest way to get started reading news on the ADN UNIX systems is to enter:

newsetup

After that, which command should you use when reading news on an ADN UNIX system? It's up to you. I like tin (and describe its use in this article) because it's full screen. You select a group, then a thread, then an article, in each case by pointing to it on list and pressing Enter. trn is line-at-a-time. It lists your choices one at a time, and asks what you want to do with each. (To be fair, some people -- including many system administrators -- like trn because it's faster; and it's certainly easier to find and subscribe to newsgroups with it.)

Want a copy of the manpage for tin or trn? Getting Started in UNIX: Printing shows how to print one. But they're both fairly long; tin's is over 30 pages and trn's is almost 50!

After some time, tin will display the list of newsgroups you've subscribed to (or, when you use it for the first time, or after entering newsetup, it will display the suggested new user's list). Tin calls this the "group selection level". After this comes the "group level", "thread level", then "article level."

Tin uses common keys for moving on all levels. For VT100, use PgUp or PgDn to move from page to page, and Up and Down to move from line to line. (There are many alternate keys for moving; for example, as with the more command, you can use Spacebar to page down.) Type q (quit) to return to the previous level, or Q to leave tin. In lists, item-specific commands act on the current item, which is highlighted or pointed to by an arrow (-->); one that's common to all lists is to press: Enter to select the current item.

The important commands available at each level are summarized in a table at the bottom of the screen; type h for additional level-specific help.

Here's how, using tin. (It's easier with trn.) Enter tin. When your list of subscribed groups is displayed (that is, at the group selection level), type: y (yank in). This reads in the balance of the almost 3,500 newsgroups that the Computer Center subscribes to. All the added groups are marked as unsubscribed (indicated by a "u" on the right).

Now select and subscribe to the additional newsgroups that you want to follow. Say that you're looking for groups on WordPerfect. Type: S (Subscribe pattern). By the prompt, type a UNIX regular expression for your subject, then press Enter. For WordPerfect, *wp* works well. Then type: y again (yank out), and the unsubscribed groups will be removed from the display. If you've added a group you don't want, highlight it, then type: u (unsubscribe). There's also U (Unsubscribe pattern), but don't depend on it; you'll too often find yourself unsubscribing to groups you wanted to keep.

Make your regular expression as specific as you can when you use either S or U. In particular, don't even think about using *c* to subscribe to C language groups! That leaves you subscribed to all the newsgroups with a "c" anywhere in their name. And if you try to reverse your mistake by using U with *c*, you'll remove all the UIC groups.

Comments are appreciated; send them
to Judith Grobe Sachs, judygs@uic.edu