ugh.book

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 <[email protected]>

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 [email protected]” 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-

[email protected].” 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: [email protected] (Mail Delivery

Subsystem)