help with uucp needed

[Jean-Pierre Radley]

In article <1990Dec28.190803.19672 at watdragon.waterloo.edu> pacolley at violet.uwaterloo.ca (Paul Colley) writes:
>In article <88 at gdx.UUCP> jay at gdx.UUCP (Jay A. Snyder) writes:
>>
>>$ uucp wa3wbu!eds1!psuvax1!rutgers!uunet!rayssd!anomaly!/usr/spool/uucppublic/archives/egrep.tar.Z ~uucp
>>
>>yeilds:
>>
>>illegal  syntax wa3wbu!eds1!psuvax1!rutgers!uunet!rayssd!anomaly!/usr/spool/uucppublic/archives/egrep.tar.Z
>>
>>How do I get this file via uucp w/o a direct connection to anomaly?
>
>Indirect UUCP doesn't work for me either.  So far, the only reply has
>been along the lines of "tough, call direct".
>
>Which doesn't answer the question!  The manual claims it's fine, but
>any attempt to have a!b!file as source gives "illegal syntax".  Assuming
>I have permissions from the machines in the path, what's the problem?

The uucp man page offers the syntax:
	uucp source.files destination.file
and then goes on to talk about how a "file name" may be of the form
a!b!..!file.

This is disingenuous and not fair, since there really IS a differerence in
what's OK to actually type for source.files as opposed to destination.file.

There is a comment line in the source code which is traduced by the man page.

The comment is:
	    /*  source files can have at most one ! */

The code which follows disallows more than one 'bang' in a source.files
specification but the man page doesn't tell you this!
(Hardly the only example of a less than perfect man page, is it?)

It's designed that way, IOW.

 Jean-Pierre Radley	    NYC Public Unix	jpr at jpr.com	CIS: 72160,1341