cancel-news

Name

cancel-news — Cancel a particular post made to the course newsgroup

Synopsis

cancel-news [ -f | --force ] [ -d | --dry-run ] [article-num]

Description

Course accounts are able to cancel news articles to the course's uw.cs newsgroup with the cancel-news script.

  • articles may be canceled from the command-line by specifying the article number.
  • articles may be canceled by piping the offending article (at least the headers) into cancel-news.
  • the script will display the entire article in a pager (hit q to only show the first page).
  • the user is normally required to confirm the cancellation with a Y or y followed by carriage-return.
    • a -f (or --force) parameter will "force" the cancellation with no article display, no confirmation; use with appropriate care.
  • a -d (or --dry-run) parameter will do everything up until the actual cancel, to see what the program would do.

Cancellations for articles which have reached external news providers (e.g. Google groups) may not be honoured by the external provider. UW has no control over what happens to news articles after they leave the campus.

Examples

Example 1: article number on command-line

            
            cs134@student.cs~> cancel-news 49152
            Path: news.uwaterloo.ca!services108.cs.uwaterloo.ca!spammer
            From: spammer 
            Newsgroups: uw.cs.cs134
            Subject: spammity spam
            Date: Fri, 4 Jun 2010 16:15:15 -0400
            Organization: University of Waterloo
            Lines: 1
            Message-ID: 
            NNTP-Posting-Host: services108.cs.uwaterloo.ca
            Mime-Version: 1.0
            Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
            X-Trace: rumours.uwaterloo.ca 1275682516 25772 129.97.152.165 (4 Jun 2010 20:15:16 GMT)
            X-Complaints-To: abuse@uwaterloo.ca
            NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 4 Jun 2010 20:15:16 +0000 (UTC)
            Xref: news.uwaterloo.ca uw.cs.cs134:49152

            Here are the products we offer.
             [ ... 20 lines ... ]  

            -- more -- 

             [ press q ]  

            Confirm article cancel [Yy] and press return: [ type y and press return ] 
            Done.
            cs134@student.cs~>

Example 2: send article from another program

  • User is running trn to read news (as course-account user).
  • the currently viewed article should be cancelled.
  • user types |cancel-news (first character is vertical bar/pipe symbol) and views the article
  • user types y and presses return.