rn 4.3 doesn't tolerate disk quota exceeded

[Gregory Smith]

In article <1707 at batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> garry%cadif-oak at cu-arpa.cs.cornell.edu writes:
>I'm running rn 4.3 and news 2.11 on a BSD 4.3 Gould. I was editing an 'f'
>followup when I exceeded my disk space quota and my (dumb) editor crashed
>followed immediately by rn locking up (either a spin or keyboard trouble;
>not sure.) I killed the login shell, returned, and discovered that my .newsrc 
>file was completely empty. I eventually discovered the existence of 
>".oldnewsrc" but by then it was empty too.
>
>Inasmuch as we have >300 newgroups nowadays, reconstructing the .newsrc
>from scratch was a trifle painful.
>
>... why was the .newsrc completely empty??

I too have been burned by this once. Once. The .newsrc file is updated
frequently during rn, in the usual UN*X manner of writing the whole
thing out and deleting the old one. Apparently, the update fails
because the disk is full and the delete goes ahead anyway ( Actually,
the old one is renamed to .oldnewsrc, and the old .oldnewsrc is
deleted, but you can still get burned).
>
>Arrrgh.

Yup. Put 'cp .newsrc .OLDnewsrc' in your login. This will fail only
if the disk is full when you login, and you shouldn't go on to
read the news if that happens.

-- 
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Greg Smith     University of Toronto      UUCP: ..utzoo!utcsri!greg
Have vAX, will hack...