Unix bboard

[Stuart D. Gathman]

I had an XT running Xenix and constructed a bboard in about a half-hour
using 'rsh' and a few shell scripts.  I did not give them a way to edit
messages because 'ed' and 'vi' let you get at files anywhere (although
they should not be able to hurt anything if permissions are set up
correctly) and I did not want to write a new editor.  This problem
could have been taken care of by using 'chroot', but ed and vi are not
exactly easy to explain to a neophyte bboard dial-in user anyway.

I used a login of 'guest'.  Standard user names were extracted
from /etc/passwd using 'sed'.  Guest user names were directories on
the 'guest' directory (obtained with 'ls').  Simple roll screen menus were used.

Some options:

Mail could be sent to standard users.  

Messages could be sent to guest users by copying to files on their directory.  
User must supply filename which must not already exist.  The first line
of a message is the summary.

Messages are displayed in time order using 'ls -t'.  Summary lines are
extracted using 'gets'.

Public messages were in the 'public' directory on 'guest'.  

Messages could be searched by context using
'fgrep' (the metachacters of 'grep' would be difficult to explain).

'cron' would delete old messages.
-- 
Stuart D. Gathman	<..!seismo!{vrdxhq|dgis}!BMS-AT!stuart>