Thanks Don. Unfortunately I am on a Windows box.

I found the following message indicating that this exercise has already been
done (in the case of Teenut's postings). However, I no longer find anything
on either of Scott Logan's sites: www.loganact.com/ or www.lathe.com or in
the Dropbox. Do you happen to know if this compilation is still available ?

David Merrill


"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
According to David Merrill :
Unless I'm missing something, doing an advanced Google Groups search on
author, "Robert Bastow" in "rec.crafts.metalworking" returns 2860
'threads'
containing one or more messages from Teenut buried among numerous other
messages. From these entire threads one would have to copy Teenut's
individual messages and paste them into a text file; certainly possible,
but
a laborious process.

Can anyone identify a more efficient way; possibly some of you in the
Linux
world, or are your Web/Usenet readers as insulated from scripting tools
as
seems to be the current case in the Windows world?

Hmm ... "lynx" is a text-only browser, which can work well for
the task, and can be coupled to shell scripts to do quite complex
things.

"wget" can download entire trees of web pages, or individual
files, so a combination of lynx to find thinks, a shell script to run
it, and wget to download to files could do it nicely.

However, for Teenut's postings, the way that *I* would go for it
is to download the relevant years from the archives at the site which
holds the official (and long un-updated) FAQs for the newsgroup. At the
University of Wyoming (something.uyo.edu), IIRC. A pointer to it can be
found in Scott Logan's weekly (or is it bi-weekly) FAQ posting. The
early years are zipped, the later ones gzipped, IIRC. And the most
recent years have not been archived, but that happened after Teenut
passed on, so all that he posted (under several usernames) is there.

Once you have it all, then you need to build up scripts to
separate the articles into individual messages, and then select the ones
you need and tie them together into a single file.

Downloading them can take a *long* time -- even with a fast net
feed. I think that they are throttled by the "uyo" site.

Early years fit into a single file. Later years were split into
two, and I think some of the very last archived were split into three
files as the volume of the newsgroup grew.

Beware, however, that in one or two years, there were some
usenet-posted virus programs archived -- along with everything else.
Thus you probably would not want to do this on a Windows box. :-)

Enjoy,
DoN.
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