UQWK Copyright 1993, steve belczyk Uqwk is a program which collects all a user's unread mail or news and formats it into something called a "QWK" packet, which is then downloaded. Mail and News can then be read offline, saving phone charges. QWK readers exist for almost every machine. Uqwk also accepts reply packets, so replies can be mailed (if your mailer understands "mail -s"), or posted (if you have a B-news type of inews that understands -n and -t), depending whether the message is marked private (email) or public (news). Uqwk also supports a small offline command language, so the contents of the user's .newsrc file can be viewed and manipulated offline. INSTALLATION 1. Create a directory for the uqwk source code. mkdir /usr/local/src/uqwk 2. Move the uqwk tar file to that directory. mv uqwk.tar.Z /usr/local/src/uqwk 3. Change to that directory, and unpack the tar file. cd /usr/local/src/uqwk; zcat uqwk.tar | tar xvf - 4. Compile the software. make If you're going to be getting news from a server using NNTP, you must use the NNTP version of the Makefile: make -f Makefile.nntp If this doesn't work you may have to twiddle with the Makefile, or, heaven forbid, the actual source code. 5. Move the binary and man pages to some public place. mv uqwk /usr/local/bin mv uqwk.man /usr/man/man1/uqwk.1 mv uqwk.cat /usr/man/cat1/uqwk.1 6. The QWK specification allows for the name, location, etc., of the BBS from which messages are being downloaded. You should configure this information. The best way is probably to use environment variables. If you are using a Bourne shell, you should add something like this to /etc/profile or .profile: UQ_BBS_NAME="My Super BBS" UQ_BBS_CITY="Somewhere, PA" UQ_BBS_PHONE="+1 215 555 1212" UQ_BBS_SYSOP="Joe Shmoe" UQ_BBS_ID="0,MYBBS" export UQ_BBS_NAME UQ_BBS_CITY UQ_BBS_PHONE export UQ_BBS_SYSOP UQ_BBS_ID If you use a C type shell, try something like this in your .cshrc or .login: setenv UQ_BBS_NAME "My Super BBS" setenv UQ_BBS_CITY "Somewhere, PA" setenv UQ_BBS_PHONE "+1 215 555 1212" setenv UQ_BBS_SYSOP "Joe Shmoe" setenv UQ_BBS_ID "0,MYBBS" In both cases, the last entry, the "BBS ID", is the most important. It always consists of an integer, a comma, and a string less than nine characters, with no intervening spaces. The string will be used to identify reply packets. 7. Now you can try it. Log in as a normal user who has some mail, and issue: uqwk +r (The "+r" stops uqwk from clearing the user's mail spool file.) This should create three new files in the current directory named messages.dat, control.dat, and personal.ndx. These are the files which the offline reader will need. (Not all readers need the *.ndx files. Also, some readers expect these files to have been archived using an archiver like zip, lharc, or arj. You may need to obtain Unix versions of these archivers.) 8. Now it would be a good idea to read the man page. Please inform me of any problems you run into: steve belczyk steve1@genesis.nred.ma.us seb3@gte.com BBS: +1 508 664 0149