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Re: sending usenet messages

1996-08-19 18:39:09
On Mon, 19 Aug 1996, Ari Lindemann wrote:

You mean there is such a thing that will get news articles for you???

I would love to get newsarticles with certain subjects in the title or by
author. I would pay for it, too. Is there such a thing?



Ari,

There's a package called "lurker" written in perl that will do that very 
thing. Here's part of the README for it ...


Lurker, by Vince Taluskie, 
taluskie(_at_)utpapa(_dot_)ph(_dot_)utexas(_dot_)edu(_dot_) 

This software is offered freely to those who might find it useful.
Comments and bug-reports should be sent to me - I will attend to them
as time permits.


Motivation
==========

If you're already reading Electronic News, you understand the term
'information overload' - there are an ever increasing number of groups
and a corresponding increase in traffic.  If you read (or attempt to
read) many groups you can find yourself falling behind the flood of
traffic and potentially missing articles of interest to you.

Lurker is a perl script which uses the flexible data structures and
powerful pattern matching operators of perl to scan newsgroups you
specify for articles which might be of interest to you.  It is hoped
that this program will help you get the information that you are most
interested in and perhaps missing now.  


Description
===========

Lurker is program written in Perl for scanning articles available via
NNTP from USENET news servers and returning those matching boolean
expressions of keywords.  Searches can be done on either the headers
of the articles or the bodies.  Header searches are useful when you
want to see articles posted by particular people.  The articles
matching the search conditions can either be mailed to an address or
stored to a specified directory perhaps for later indexing with WAIS.

This will enable a user to monitor a newsgroup for articles which
contain certain keywords without wading through every single posting
by hand.  It's also an advantage that someone using lurker to locate
information doesn't have to depend on the subject lines posters use to
summarize what's in the article - because the contents of the article
have been examined.


Installation
============

You can get started by retrieving via anonymous ftp the file

utpapa.ph.utexas.edu:/pub/perl/lurker-1.0.tar

this tar archive will contain the lurker perl script, the nntp.pl
package which makes the nntp interaction possible, this README file and
chat2.pl, which is also used.

============
Aloha,
/PA

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