Re: Yarn (DOS) -> Linux

From: rex (rex@ptw.com)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2000 19:23:52 +0000

On Sun, Mar 26, 2000 at 05:40:44PM -0500, Wayne Dernoncourt wrote:
>
> I'm not worried that much about mail, I'm more worried about the
> newsgroups. I'm sure I have many megabytes worth of cartoons from
> email stored away in the humor clippings, but I have lots of files of
> newsgroup and listserv postings (~1,000 files). These yarn clippings
> were done with the "o" function to store the entire article in a "YARN"
> file, not an ASCII file. I would copy all of these clipping files
> to a zip file and take them to work - when there got to be to many to
> fit on a floppy, I would move the largest ones to a subdirectory under
> \INET\yymm (ie \INET\9804 would contain 4 files totaling 870k).

It's been a while since I looked at the format, but, IIRC, these files
are ASCII files with a 32 bit length indicator between each post. It
should be easy (albeit tedious) to convert them to *nix mail format.

> When I need to find something, I use grep and list to find stuff,
> once it's located, I copy the file back to the YARN\MAIL directory
> (with a differet title in case the name is already being used, the
> Unix shell newsgroup will be called shell.unx no matter which
> month/year it is), fire up yarn and actually get the article. As
> you can tell, this is a royal pain in the backside. Luckily I
> don't need it on a regular basis!

Is there some reason you can't open the file directly in your editor,
search for what you want, and paste the post wherever you want it?
I often open another Mutt session in another X window and do this.
Let's see...
<clickty-click>

Yes, I just opened a 43 MB (slightly over a million lines) native
format Yarn mail file (which is on a DOS partition) directly with Jed
(my fave Linux editor), did a search, and pasted the desired section
into another Jed session. I think the same procedure will work will a
Yarn news file.

> But this still needs DOS to run & I want to switch to Linux!

I had a dual boot Win/Linux system for several years, but I couldn't
make myself switch to Linux as my primary system until I bit the
bullet and starting doing email under Linux. That did it, and I boot
Windows once every couple of weeks now. Any DOS apps I have will run
under DOSEMU.

-rex