Minor incompatibility between Cnews and A/UX (possible Cnews bug)

[Alexis Rosen]

Maybe this is obvious to other A/UX users, but it wasn't to me. There's some
possibility that this affects other, non-A/UX sites as well.

The Cnews "queuelen" script varies depending on which type of uucp your
system has. The seemingly correct version to tell Cnews about is "ancient".
At first glance the resulting queuelen script seems fine. But in fact, it's
missing a period in one place, which results in its always returning zero.

Here is the original line (it's the last line in the script):
	ls | egrep "^C\.$site$grade....\$" | wc | awk '{print $1}'

and here is the way it should look:
	ls | egrep "^C\.$site$grade.....\$" | wc | awk '{print $1}'
	                           ----^

A/UX has a _really_ _BAD_ UUCP, it's true, but I doubt that they bothered
to hack the code just to add one more character to the UUCP file names. So
it's possible that this is a Cnews bug which affects all users of ancient-
uucp systems.

Also, quite interestingly, I've discovered that egrep seems to be _much_
slower than grep at doing this. res at colnet.uucp (Rob Stampfli) first mentioned
that this was true on a Unix-PC, and it's true on Macs as well. Perhaps it's
System V-dependant? Or is this just a special case where egrep is unusually
slow?

---
Alexis Rosen
Owner/Sysadmin, PANIX Public Access Unix, NY
alexis at panix.com
{cmcl2,apple}!panix!alexis