Coder's Guild Mailing List

Re: Linux stuff (news grep programming)

Posted by Matthew Pratt on 1999-04-18

--- Colin S Asquith <ceecsa@xxx.xx.xx.xx> wrote:
> I want to be able to search through a newsfeed, say

You know about http://www.dejanews.com dont you?

> the new messages I have
> every day, and I want to (in a Kibo sort of way)
> search for patterns, maybe
> for my name, or for the word Linux etc. Can I do
> this, in Linux I presume
> that I can, but how would I go about this? I have a
> constant internet
> connection (through a LAN) and think that there may
> be something in the
> /var/spool/ area that might suit, but I am not sure
> how this works, and can

There are a few programs that dowload news feeds. One
is called suck, so do a search on www.google.com or
whatever.

Then after you have something like that running you
could use, a awk or perl script, or egrep to search
the messages for whatever you want. You could quite
easily add a cgi front end and have it run thru your
web browser.

> someone suggest a better news reader than tin? I can
> get used to it, though
> Netscapes one isn;t too hot. Pine is OK, but there
> is nothing that seems as
> easy as Eudora etc. in win. I am trying to slowly
> migrate my PC (it is a
> dual booter) and one by one, I am swapping
> applications, so now I program in
> C/C++ and a bit of Java with Linux, but I do VB and
> Word Processing, and
> email/news in Win. I know there are some cool Star
> Office things for Linux

Word Perfect 8 for linux is very good too, and is
free.

> and that they are good, but I would only swap to
> them if I could get my
> email (easy!) and news in Linux. Just as I do a lot
> of reading, I need a
> quick tool!

Try the news reader associated with the GNOME and KDE
projects. Maybe you could pick the one you like better
and add the functionality that you want (I seem to be
doing this sort of thing all the time these days).

> You see what I mean?

I think so... you want a random file chooser right?
This should not be very hard, and in fact, if you want
random pictures for your X background there are
already programs that do this. This also reminds me of
a program I wrote for a friend. It did exactly what
you describe, it picked a radom boot logo (for
'doze95) from a directory and copied it to
c:\logo.sys. I put it in his autoexec.bat so he got a
different logo each boot. It was only a couple of
lines of C and should be even easier under linux.

> Also- if I want to backup some files regulary, how
> do I set cron to do this.
> I read the Man pages, but they sort of dive right on
> in to the depths
> straight away.... crontab -e? Then for a daily
> program, say a script called
> "backup" that simply does this:
 
> # Backup script
> copy my_most_important_file.dat /backups
> 
> Every day at 1am, does this mean that I can get it
> to run like that
> constantly without being logged in (i.e. logim
> screen is up?) I think that I
> can if I do it as root, otherwise it runs only when
> I am logged in.

No you dont have to be logged in for cron jobs to run.
In fact every box comes with udatedb in the cron list
for about 3:00am every day, and since I sleep in the
same room as my machine, the crunching of the drives
sometimes wakes me.

If the cron man pages are to heavy you should try the 
info pages or get a good book on linux/UNIX.

Also since you machine is permenantly connected you
should consider shuting down the services you never
use. Look in /etc/inetd.conf and comment out the
services you either dont know about or dont use. Then
"killall -HUP inetd" as root to restart inetd. Also if
you are running Red Hat, you should download all the
latest patches and apply them (in fact this applies to
any OS). The reason I say this is that I have seen a
number of scripts floating around that scan ranges of
IP addresses for weaknesses in common services like
ftp, sendmail etc, and if you run and outdated version
there are known bugs in some of these programs. Thats
not to say that linux is any less secure than any
other OS, you should see the patches for solaris. I
also have a tar file here with about 20 exploits and
D-O-S attacks for NT, and most spoof their IP and so
are untraceable.


===
Matty                                       .
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mattpratt@xxxxx.xxx                    /      \
s3099239@xxxxxxx.xxx.xxx.xx            \_.--._/<--Canberra,
W2K - The other millenium bug.               v    Australia

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