How do I send newsgroup posts in HTML to my web client?

How to do this depends greatly on your system; if you have a Mac or Windows system, the answer is completely different. But, as food for thought, here is a simple shell script I use on my Unix account to send posts from rn and related newsreaders to Lynx. Put this text in the file "readwebpost" and use the "chmod" command to make it executable, then put it somewhere in your path (such as your personal bin directory):

#!/bin/sh
echo \<PRE\> > .article.html 
cat >> .article.html 
echo \</PRE\> >> .article.html 
lynx .article.html  < /dev/tty
rm .article.html

Then add the following line to your .rnmac file (create it if you don't already have one):

W     |readwebpost %C

Now, when you press "W" while reading a post in rn, a message will be sent to Lynx, and the links enclosed in it will be live.

Larry W. Virden provides the following version which invokes Mosaic instead, and is also capable of communicating with an already-running copy of Mosaic instead of launching another. (You can use the same rn macro as above, invoking "goto-xm" instead of "readwebpost".) Read the comments for details on the assumptions made by the script.

#! /bin/sh
# goto-xm, by Joseph T. Buck <jbuck@eecs.berkeley.edu>
# Modified heavily by Larry W. Virden <lvirden@cas.org>
# Script for use with newsreaders such as trn.  Piping the article
# through this command causes xmosaic to pop up, pointing to the
# article.  If an existing xmosaic (version 1.1 or later) exists,
# the USR1 method will be used to cause it to point to the correct
# article, otherwise a new one will be started.

# assumptions: ps command works as is on SunOS 4.1.x, may need changes
# on other platforms.

URL=`/bin/grep '^Message-ID:' | /bin/sed -e 's/.*</news:/' -e 's/>.*//'`
if [ "X$URL" = "X" ]; then
        echo "USAGE: $0 [goto] [once] < USENET_msg" >&2
        exit 1
fi

pid=`ps -xc | egrep '[Mm]osaic' | awk 'NR == 1 {print $1}'`
p=`which Mosaic`
gfile=/tmp/Mosaic.$pid

$p "$URL" &

if      [ "$#" -gt 0 ] ; then
  if    [ "$1" = "goto" -o "$1" = "same" ] ; then
        shift
        echo "goto"   > $gfile
  else
        echo "newwin" > $gfile
  fi
else
        echo "newwin" > $gfile
fi
/bin/awk 'END { printf "'"$URL"'" }' </dev/null >> $gfile

trap "echo signal encountered" 30
kill -USR1 $pid

exit 0

See also MosaicMail (URL is http://www.oac.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/mhonarc.doc.html ), a Perl script which pipes email and/or news to your current Mosaic session.

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