cnews with ksh - problems

[Augustine Cano]

In article <1991Feb10.201546.14336 at ceilidh.beartrack.com> dnichols at ceilidh.beartrack.com writes:
>
>	When I brought up Cnews, I could read and reply to postings in any
>newsgroup, but could not originate articles.  The system would churn for a
>while, then would pop up a message about 'comp.sys.3b1: not in active file'.
>An examination of the active file would show comp.sys.3b1 present, and
>Folowups to comp.sys.3b1 would work with no problems.  I use 'comp.sys.3b1'
>as an example, the problem occurred with any group.
>
>	I isolated the problem to a few lines in 'inews', and tried
>exercising that part of the code manually.  Everything worked!  I than tried
>switching to sh (I run under ksh).  It worked!

This is the well-known (I must have seen a dozen postings about it) egreppat
problem in inews.  Of course I had it too when I first installed cnews, so
I asked:  I got at least 3 different fixes.  Maybe this is a good candidate
for the FAQ file?

>
>	I looked for a way to test whether I was running under ksh (at least
>on this machine) and settled on an 'if [ $RANDOM -ne $RANDOM ]' to tell me
>that I was running ksh.  If it passed this test, I would re-start with
>/bin/sh.  With this news postings worked smoothly, at the slight cost of a
>restart if ksh were the one running.

Yet another way to fix it...

>
>	I just recently got the 'KSH+IN' from osu-cis.  As an experiment, I
>commented out my test code, and things worked smoothly without the test.  (I
>had been running the ksh from fixdisk 2.0).

This is probably the definitive way to fix it.  No changes to the code to be
made after each patch to cnews, and we dump an obsolete KSH at the same time.

>	Hope that this helps others faced with the same problem.
>
>BTW - this also fixed the problem of my .kshistory being owned by root after
>a 'su'.

Interesting...

>	Good Luck All
>		DoN.
>-- 
>Donald Nichols (DoN.)		| Voice (Days):	(703) 664-1585
>D&D Data			| Voice (Eves):	(703) 938-4564
>Disclaimer: from here - None	| Email:     <dnichols at ceilidh.beartrack.com>
>	--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---


-- 
Augustine Cano		INTERNET: afc at shibaya.lonestar.org
			UUCP:     ...!{ernest,egsner}!shibaya!afc