What is the RN Command?

Home ITS Services ITS Support Center What is the RN Command?

The RN Command

Use the commands rn and Pnews to read and post on the USENET News. The commands are located in /cats/public/sparcbin on Athena, and in /usr/public on other machines, so you need to have the appropriate one in your search path (to do this on Athena, type add public; to do it automatically for every future session, type bind_locker public). To read the 19 page manual, type:

% man rn

This handout tries to distill the essentials from the manual pages. There are several levels of use and understanding about reading the News. What follow takes you through the basics and a little beyond, but for complete information read the manual pages.

How do I use RN?

The first time you type rn, it sets up a .newsrc file in your home directory to keep track of the newsgroups you want to read, the order you want to read them, and the ones you have already read. So to try it, log in your ITS account, then type:

% rn

You can read the News fairly successfully by simply remembering the following three commands:

• y - Yes, read the group or article
• n - go to the Next newsgroup or article
• q - Quit the group or reading the news

Rn operates on three levels: the newsgroup selection level, the article selection level, and the paging (within an article) level. If you type q at the group level you quit the News. If you type q at the article level you quit that group, and if you type q while reading an article, you quit just that article. It is important to understand the different levels. At any level, at any prompt, type h to give you a list of all available commands. This is probably the most important command, so remember it! At any level, pressing the SPACE bar gives you the default command, usually y for yes.

First, read the messages in the newsgroup news.announce.newusers before using the News very much, and especially before submitting an article (if you post offensive messages or inappropriate messages, you may lose your ITS account). Second, if you already tried rn, you probably discovered that there are far too many newsgroups to be able to read all of them, so be selective. While at the group level, you can use the m (move) command to rearrange the order of the groups so that the most interesting groups appear at the top of your list. For example at the group level, type m 2 to move the current newsgroup to second place.

Once a month, the news.announce.newusers newsgroup provides an article listing all newsgroups. The article may have expired by the time you try to read it since most articles stay around only a week or so, depending on the group they are in, then they disappear. ITS also keeps this list in their on-line help system (see below). Look at this information to get a better idea of which groups you want to read. UCSC does not subscribe to all the groups listed.

Beyond the Basics

Now that you have used rn a little, here are some more sophisticated commands. These commands are used at the newsgroup level:

• u - Unsubscribe from the current newsgroup. This means you will no longer be asked about this group, unless you resubscribe to it with the g command.
• = - List the subjects in this newsgroup before displaying the articles. Then you can use the c or j commands to get rid of the non-interesting articles, or you can type the number of the article you want to read.
• c - Catch up: mark all the unread articles in this newsgroup as read. This command is especially useful after using the = command and you decide not to look at any of the articles.
• j - Junk (discard) the article, or a range of articles if used like this: 10-15 j. /pat Skip forward to the next newsgroup matching the pattern. These commands are used at the article level: n Go to the next article.
• ^N - Scan forward for the next article with the same subject (CTRL-N).
• k - Mark (kill) as red all articles with the same subject. This is very useful for eliminating topics you are not interested in.

There are many commands useful while reading an article. At this bottom level rn uses the more program to page the article; type man more to read the manual page describing its capabilities. These commands are used within an article:

• SPACE - Display another screenful (press the SPACE bar).
• q - Quit reading the current article.
• b - Back up a screenful;
• 3b - back up 3 screenfuls.
• !xx - Execute the xx UNIX command.
• ^R - Restart the current article (CTRL-R).
• ^X - Restart the current article, using rot13, used for potentially offensive messages (CTRL-X).
• ^B - Back up a screenful (CTRL-B).
• g - pat Go to the next occurrence of the pattern.

Saving and printing articles

Articles can be saved to a file or piped to another program, like mail or the printer. At the article level (say, you just read an interesting article that you want to save in some way), type either:

• s filename
• s | unix-command

When you save a file from rn, it saves it in a subdirectory named News. A pipe can be used to send an article to another person or to send the article to a printer like this:

• s | mail joseph@ucsc.edu
• s | lpr -Pxx

General Advice

If you haven't read the News for a long time, or you want to start anew, simply delete your .newsrc file. The next time you use rn, it creates a brand new .newsrc file.

It is much easier to edit the file .newsrc to move newsgroups around than to use the move (m) command. The order of the lines indicates the order of the newsgroups. When editing your .newsrc file, notice that there is either a : or a ! after the newsgroup name, then a list of numbers indicating the articles you have already read. The : indicates you are currently subscribing to this newsgroup; a ! indicates that you are not. So by changing the : into a !, you can unsubscribe to a newsgroup (and vice-versa).

Posting Messages

To post an article, use the Pnews command. Try posting to one of the test newsgroups first so you can see how it works.