NNGOBACK(1)               UNIX System V(Release 6.4)                NNGOBACK(1)


NAME
      nngoback - make news articles unread on a day-by-day basis (nn)

SYNOPSIS
      nngoback [ -NQvi ] [-d] days [ group ]...

DESCRIPTION
      nngoback will rewind the .newsrc record file of nn(1) one or more days.
      It can be used to rewind all groups, or only a specified set of groups.
      In other words, nngoback can mark news articles which have arrived on the
      system during the last days days unread.

      Only subscribed groups that occur in the current presentation sequence
      are rewound.  That means that if no group arguments are specified, all
      groups occurring in the sequence defined in the init file will be
      rewound.  Otherwise, only the groups specified on the argument line will
      be rewound.

      When a group is rewound, the information about selections, partially read
      digests etc. are discarded.  It will print notifications about this
      unless the -Q (quiet) option is used.

      If the -i (interactive) option is specified, nngoback will report for
      each how many articles can be marked unread, and ask for confirmation
      before going back in that group.

      If the -v (verbose) option is specified, nngoback will report how many
      articles are marked unread.

      If the -N (no-update) option is specified, nngoback will perform the
      entire goback operation, but not update the .newsrc file.

      If you are not up-to-date with your news reading, you can also use
      nngoback to catch up to only have the last few days of news waiting to be
      read in the following way:
            nn -a0
            nngoback 3
      The nn command will mark all articles in all groups as read (answer all
      to the catch-up question.)  The following nngoback will then make the
      last three days of news unread again.

      Examples:

      nngoback 0
            Mark the articles which have arrived today as unread.

      nngoback 1
            Mark the articles which have arrived yesterday and today as unread.

      nngoback 6
            Mark the articles which have arrived during the last week as
            unread.


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NNGOBACK(1)               UNIX System V(Release 6.4)                NNGOBACK(1)


      You cannot go more than 14 days back with nngoback.  (You can change this
      limit as described below.)

THE BACK_ACT DAEMON
      It is a prerequisite for the use of nngoback that the script back_act is
      executed at an appropriate time once (and only once) every day.
      Preferably this is done by cron right before the bacth of news for
      `today' is received.  back_act will maintain copies of the active file
      for the last 14 days.

      Optionally, the back_act program accepts a single numerical argument
      specifying how many copies of the active file it should maintain.  This
      is useful if news is expired after 7 days, in which case keeping more
      than 7 days of active file copies is wasteful.

FILES
      ~/.newsrc            The record of read articles.
      ~/.newsrc.goback     The original rc file before goback.
      $db/active.N         The N days `old' active file.
      $master/back_act     Script run by cron to maintain old active files.

SEE ALSO
      nn(1), nncheck(1), nngrab(1), nngrep(1), nnpost(1), nntidy(1)
      nnadmin(1M), nnusage(1M), nnmaster(8)

NOTES
      nngoback does not check the age of the `old' active files; it will
      blindly believe that active.0 was created today, and that active.7 is
      really seven days old!  Therefore, the back_act script should be run once
      and only once every day for nngoback to work properly.

      The days are counted relative to the time the active files were copied.

AUTHOR
      Kim F. Storm, Texas Instruments A/S, Denmark
      E-mail: storm@texas.dk


















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