man > nngoback(1)

NNGOBACK(1)                            General Commands Manual                           NNGOBACK(1)

NAME
       nngoback - make news articles unread on a day-by-day basis (nn)

SYNOPSIS
       nngoback [ -NQvi ] [-d] days [ group ]...

DESCRIPTION
       nngoback  will  rewind  the .newsrc record file of nn(1) one or more days.  It can be used to
       rewind all groups, or only a specified set of groups.  In other words, nngoback can mark news
       articles which have arrived on the system during the last days days unread.

       Only subscribed groups that occur in the current presentation  sequence  are  rewound.   That
       means  that if no group arguments are specified, all groups occurring in the sequence defined
       in the init file will be rewound.  Otherwise, only the groups specified on the argument  line
       will be rewound.

       When  a  group  is rewound, the information about selections, partially read digests etc. are
       discarded.  It will print notifications about this unless the -Q (quiet) option is used.

       If the -i (interactive) option is specified, nngoback will report for each how many  articles
       can be marked unread, and ask for confirmation before going back in that group.

       If  the  -v  (verbose) option is specified, nngoback will report how many articles are marked
       unread.

       If the -N (no-update) option is specified, nngoback will perform the entire goback operation,
       but not update the .newsrc file.

       If you are not up-to-date with your news reading, you can also use nngoback to  catch  up  to
       only have the last few days of news waiting to be read in the following way:
            nn -a0
            nngoback 3
       The nn command will mark all articles in all groups as read (answer all to the catch-up ques‐
       tion.)  The following nngoback will then make the last three days of news unread again.

       Examples:

       nngoback 0
              Mark the articles which have arrived today as unread.

       nngoback 1
              Mark the articles which have arrived yesterday and today as unread.

       nngoback 6
              Mark the articles which have arrived during the last week as unread.

       You  cannot go more than 14 days back with nngoback.  (You can change this limit as described
       below.)

THE BACK_ACT DAEMON
       It is a prerequisite for the use of nngoback that the script back_act is executed at  an  ap‐
       propriate  time once (and only once) every day.  Preferably this is done by cron right before
       the bacth of news for `today' is received.  back_act will maintain copies of the active  file
       for the last 14 days.

       Optionally,  the  back_act  program  accepts  a single numerical argument specifying how many
       copies of the active file it should maintain.  This is useful if  news  is  expired  after  7
       days, in which case keeping more than 7 days of active file copies is wasteful.

FILES
       ~/.newsrc            The record of read articles.
       ~/.newsrc.goback     The original rc file before goback.
       $db/active.N         The N days `old' active file.
       $master/back_act     Script run by cron to maintain old active files.

SEE ALSO
       nn(1), nncheck(1), nngrab(1), nngrep(1), nnpost(1), nntidy(1)
       nnadmin(1M), nnusage(1M), nnmaster(8)

NOTES
       nngoback  does  not check the age of the `old' active files; it will blindly believe that ac‐
       tive.0 was created today, and that  active.7  is  really  seven  days  old!   Therefore,  the
       back_act script should be run once and only once every day for nngoback to work properly.

       The days are counted relative to the time the active files were copied.

AUTHOR
       Kim F. Storm, Texas Instruments A/S, Denmark
       E-mail: storm AT texas.dk

4th Berkeley Distribution                    Release 6.6                                 NNGOBACK(1)