NAME

       nngoback - make news articles unread on a day-by-day basis (nn)

SYNOPSIS

       nngoback [ -NQvi ] [-d] days [ group ]...

DESCRIPTION

       nngoback  will  rewind  the  .newsrc record file of nn(1) one or more days.  It can be used to rewind all
       groups, or only a specified set of groups.  In other words, nngoback can mark news  articles  which  have
       arrived on the system during the last days days unread.

       Only  subscribed  groups that occur in the current presentation sequence are rewound.  That means that if
       no group arguments are specified, all groups occurring in the sequence defined in the init file  will  be
       rewound.  Otherwise, only the groups specified on the argument line will be rewound.

       When a group is rewound, the information about selections, partially read digests etc. are discarded.  It
       will print notifications about this unless the -Q (quiet) option is used.

       If  the  -i  (interactive)  option  is  specified, nngoback will report for each how many articles can be
       marked unread, and ask for confirmation before going back in that group.

       If the -v (verbose) option is specified, nngoback will report how many articles are marked unread.

       If the -N (no-update) option is specified, nngoback will perform the entire  goback  operation,  but  not
       update the .newsrc file.

       If  you are not up-to-date with your news reading, you can also use nngoback to catch up to only have the
       last few days of news waiting to be read in the following way:
            nn -a0
            nngoback 3
       The nn command will mark all articles in all groups as read (answer all to the catch-up  question.)   The
       following nngoback will then make the last three days of news unread again.

       Examples:

       nngoback 0
              Mark the articles which have arrived today as unread.

       nngoback 1
              Mark the articles which have arrived yesterday and today as unread.

       nngoback 6
              Mark the articles which have arrived during the last week as unread.

       You cannot go more than 14 days back with nngoback.  (You can change this limit as described below.)

THE BACK_ACT DAEMON

       It  is a prerequisite for the use of nngoback that the script back_act is executed at an appropriate time
       once (and only once) every day.  Preferably this is done by cron right  before  the  bacth  of  news  for
       `today' is received.  back_act will maintain copies of the active file for the last 14 days.

       Optionally,  the  back_act  program accepts a single numerical argument specifying how many copies of the
       active file it should maintain.  This is useful if news is expired after 7 days, in  which  case  keeping
       more than 7 days of active file copies is wasteful.

FILES

       ~/.newsrc            The record of read articles.
       ~/.newsrc.goback     The original rc file before goback.
       $db/active.N         The N days `old' active file.
       $master/back_act     Script run by cron to maintain old active files.

SEE ALSO

       nn(1), nncheck(1), nngrab(1), nngrep(1), nnpost(1), nntidy(1)
       nnadmin(1M), nnusage(1M), nnmaster(8)

NOTES

       nngoback  does  not  check  the  age of the `old' active files; it will blindly believe that active.0 was
       created today, and that active.7 is really seven days old!  Therefore, the back_act script should be  run
       once and only once every day for nngoback to work properly.

       The days are counted relative to the time the active files were copied.

AUTHOR

       Kim F. Storm, Texas Instruments A/S, Denmark
       E-mail: storm@texas.dk

4th Berkeley Distribution                          Release 6.6                                       NNGOBACK(1)