Having accumulated a newsgroup in Yarn 0.89 with over 12,000 articles,
I thoughtlessly pressed SPACE thinking I would load them in and clean
out the spams and garbage at least. Ouch! 3 hours later the '386 was
still exercising the disk drive, and ^C nor ESC nor any other trick I
could think of would BREAK the process. FIFTEEN hours later, the process
ended properly -- and of course then exercised all the stop/break commands
from much earlier, so the entire time was a waste!
The next morning (the 15 hours later), I finally conceded to myself that
I'd most likely never get around to reading even a few of the articles,
so I decided to extinguish them with the C command. That only took a
half hour.
When it finished marking everything 'read' I exited and went back into
Yarn, hoping that would solidify the recent changes. Then I read and
replied to several newsgroups prior to the cleaned out one, creating about
six reply posts/letters. Noticing that the 'cleaned' group now showed 24
articles, I again thoughtlessly [ =( ] pressed SPACE thinking it wouldn't
take but a couple of seconds to load up the 24 articles for inspection.
Hah! Another unbreakable look which had to be left running for 10 hours
or so while away at work.
(Fortunately, I have two computers linked with a LAN network so I was
able to copy the .MSG files from the working Yarn directory to a fake
one on the other machine, which then zipped them into a reply packet which
could be sent; otherwise, the replies would have been inaccessible for
the 10 hours with the risk that if the machine hung they would probably
be lost altogether.
CHIN... the point of my tale here is to ask (beg) that maybe you could
embed a check for ^C or some other break code into such loops,
so that one could get out if they do something dumb and want to save the
half day processes for some time later.... purty pleeeze!
--
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Jim Cooper w2jc@ritz.mordor.com
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"Grassroots can grow through concrete."
- Jim DePoe <aare@ph001193.uuhare6.rabbit.net>,
as quoted in Jim Warren's _GovAccess_ e-newsletter.
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