Canceling Course News Posts

Course accounts are able to cancel news articles to the course's uw.cs newsgroup with the cancel-news script.

• articles may be canceled from the command-line by specifying the article number.
• articles may be canceled by piping the offending article (at least the headers) into cancel-news.

• the script will display the entire article in a pager (hit q to only show the first page).
• the user is normally required to confirm the cancellation with a Y or y followed by carriage-return.
  • a -f (or --force) parameter will "force" the cancellation with no article display, no confirmation; use with appropriate care.
• a -d (or --dry-run) parameter will do everything up until the actual cancel, to see what the program would do.

Examples

Example 1: article number on command-line

cs134@student.cs~> cancel-news 49152
Path: news.uwaterloo.ca!services108.cs.uwaterloo.ca!spammer
From: spammer 
Newsgroups: uw.cs.cs134
Subject: spammity spam
Date: Fri, 4 Jun 2010 16:15:15 -0400
Organization: University of Waterloo
Lines: 1
Message-ID: 
NNTP-Posting-Host: services108.cs.uwaterloo.ca
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
X-Trace: rumours.uwaterloo.ca 1275682516 25772 129.97.152.165 (4 Jun 2010 20:15:16 GMT)
X-Complaints-To: abuse@uwaterloo.ca
NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 4 Jun 2010 20:15:16 +0000 (UTC)
Xref: news.uwaterloo.ca uw.cs.cs134:49152

Here are the products we offer.

-- more --

[ press q ]

Confirm article cancel [Yy] and press return: [ type y and press return ]

Done.
cs134@student.cs~> 

Example 2: send article from another program

• User is running mutt to read news (as course-account user).
• the currently viewed article should be cancelled.
• user types |cancel-news (first character is vertical bar/pipe symbol) and views the article
• user types y and presses return.

-- DanielAllen - 04 Jun 2010