Need to patch inews/rnews so it will watch for inode underflow

[Steve Rudek]

Once upon a time I thought 70 megs of storage was massive; then I met usenet!
Now every night before I go to bed I say a little prayer that I won't awake
to an inode underflow caused by an inews that is too stupid to look before it
leaps.
 
Does anyone have a patch for inews which will give it a little intelligence and
allow it to exit rather than corrupt the inode table?
 
If not, can anyone provide me with a C routine to count inodes?  I suppose
I could periodically run "df -t" as a child of inews and catch the result via
a pipe . . . but that would be ugly and slow.