From brown@NCoast.ORG Wed Aug 24 19:33:32 1994 Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.os.msdos.programmer,comp.archives.msdos.d,comp.std.c From: brown@NCoast.ORG (Stan Brown) Subject: How to find FAQ lists Date: Tue, 23 Aug 1994 22:03:15 GMT Followup-To: poster Organization: nej tak! X-Last-Modified: 28 April 1994 I try to post the following irregularly, every couple of months or so. In addition, I always email it to anyone who posts asking where to find a FAQ list. Please save this information, and feel free to pass it on to anyonw eho may need it. If you can add to the set of exceptions at the end of this message, please send me details. HOW TO GET FAQ LISTS (THREE METHODS AND SOME EXCEPTIONS) (last revised 28 April 1994) (send corrections to Stan Brown, brown@ncoast.org) There are lots of ways for you to get Frequently Asked Questions lists (FAQ lists), including ftp and email among others. I list the methods that I know of from easiest to most difficult (which is also in increasing order of use of net resources). These instructions use some specific newsgroups as examples. If you're interested in different newsgroups, use their names instead of the ones in my examples. Just follow the same patterns of punctuation (periods and / marks). For a very few newsgroups, the standard instructions won't work; please see "Special Cases" below. (As of 29 Mar 1994, rec.arts.books.tolkien is no longer a special case.) There are other sites and other methods beyond those that I list in these instructions. You may want to consult the article "Introduction to *.answers", posted frequently in the news.answers newsgroup. Among other things, that article lists some European archive sites for FAQ lists and other periodic postings. If you can't get that article by METHOD 1 below, try METHOD 2 or METHOD 3 using the archive name news-answers/introduction . METHOD 1: resources at your site When looking for an FAQ list, first do the obvious and check the relevant newsgroup for articles with "FAQ" or "frequently" in the subject line. If you don't know how to check articles that your newsreader has already marked as read, ask your sysadmin or an experienced user at your site. Next, try the group news.answers. FAQ lists for many groups are cross- posted there. Subject lines often contain the names of the newsgroups (often, but not always). For instance, all the misc.consumers FAQ lists will have "misc.consumers" in their subject lines. Again, your sysadmin can tell you the commands to use in searching. The articles in news.answers are posted in such a way that each version should stay around at each site until the new version is posted. But some sites are configured so that this does not occur. If FAQ lists that you're looking for have expired in news.answers at your site, you can get copies of them by FTP or email. (You might also want to speak to your sysadmin, suggesting that she give news.answers a longer expiry time than other groups. It's a moderated group, so its signal-to-noise ratio is far above the Usenet average.) METHOD 2: anonymous ftp to rtfm.mit.edu Jonathan Kamens of OpenVision Technologies, Inc. (formerly of MIT's Project Athena, which still supports the archive) has kindly set up an archive of periodic postings (including FAQ lists) at rtfm.mit.edu . When ftp-ing to that site, use anonymous as your user name and use your email address as your password. The structure of the Usenet portions of the archives is that each newsgroup is a subdirectory under /pub/usenet. So if you want the FAQ list for comp.lang.c, change directory to /pub/usenet/comp.lang.c and see what's there. The file names will be the article titles, with underscore (_) replacing any spaces. Yes, this makes for very long article names. You can also use the "archive name" that is just after the header of many periodic informational articles. (See below for how to find out any archive name that you don't know.) In this case, change directory to /pub/usenet/news.answers and then use the archive name in your get or mget command. For example, the archive name of the comp.lang.c FAQ is C-faq/faq, so you would issue these commands in sequence: cd /pub/usenet/news.answers get C-faq/faq (Other subdirectories of /pub/usenet contain periodic postings that may not appear in news.answers.) Here are some articles to retrieve and read if you want to get the best use out of Usenet: /pub/usenet/news.answers/news-answers/introduction /pub/usenet/news.answers/news-announce-intro/part1 /pub/usenet/news.answers/news-newusers-intro /pub/usenet/news.answers/posting-rules/part1 Don't worry about the files that have a part1 and no part2; that's just how the directory structure is set up. If you don't know the archive names of the articles that you want, you can get a list of all periodic postings that are archived in news.answers by retrieving this file: /pub/usenet/news.answers/index If you get errors like "permission denied" or "no access", check to make sure that you have write access to your local directory. Messages such as these are local problems, not problems at rtfm.mit.edu. Any remote ftp error will have a three-digit error code at the front. METHOD 3: email to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu For those who have no access to ftp, Jonathan Kamens has kindly set up an email server for the archive of periodic postings (including FAQ lists) at rtfm.mit.edu . You can retrieve articles by archive name (which is posted at the beginning of each article, just after the header) or by subject line. See below for instructions on getting the contents of the archives. To retrieve a file by archive name from the server, send email with a blank subject line and one or more send commands in the body of the message, one per line. (Omit the "/pub/" part of the filename.) For example, to retrieve the FAQ list for comp.lang.c, put this command in your message: send usenet/news.answers/C-faq/faq To get some helpful information on making the best use of Usenet, retrieve these files: send usenet/news.answers/news-answers/introduction send usenet/news.answers/news-announce-intro/part1 send usenet/news.answers/news-newusers-intro send usenet/news.answers/posting-rules/part1 Don't worry about files that have part1 and no part2; that's just how the directory structure is set up. If you don't know the names of the articles that you want, you can get a list of all periodic postings that are archived in news.answers by emailing this command to the server: send usenet/news.answers/index You can also retrieve periodically posted articles by subject line; in this case the directory is not news.answers but the "home" newsgroup of the article. The file names will be the article titles, with underscore (_) replacing any spaces. Yes, this makes for very long article names. For example, send usenet/news.announce.newusers/Introduction_to_the_*.answers_newsgroups If you know the name of the newsgroup you're interested in, request the special file "index" to get the contents of the archive for that newsgroup. For example, to get the names of articles archived for comp.lang.c, use this command send usenet/comp.lang.c/index For general instructions on using the server, send it an email message containing these two lines: help send index SPECIAL CASE: comp.std.c comp.std.c has no FAQ list. But there is an excellent FAQ list in comp.lang.c, which answers many questions about the ANSI/ISO standard and standard C. SPECIAL CASE: comp.os.ms-windows.* The Windows FAQ and Windows Programmer FAQ are posted every 30-60 days by Tom Haapanen (tomh@metrics.com), to comp.binaries.ms-windows in WinHelp format and to comp.os.ms-windows.announce in ASCII text format. If they have expired from those newsgroups (as is likely), look for instructions posted weekly to most of the comp.os.ms-windows.* newsgroups. You can retrieve the instructions (not the FAQs) from rtfm.mit.edu. Using METHOD 2 above, retrieve files /pub/usenet/comp.os.ms-windows.misc/Windows_FAQ:_How_to_get_it /pub/usenet/comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.tools/Windows_Programmer_FAQ:_How_to_get_it Using METHOD 3, give these commands to the email server: send usenet/comp.os.ms-windows.misc/Windows_FAQ:_How_to_get_it send usenet/comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.tools/Windows_Programmer_FAQ:_How_to_get_it ---------------------------------------------------(end how to get FAQs) -- Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems brown@Ncoast.ORG Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not "special rights". Can't find FAQ lists? ftp to 'rtfm.mit.edu' and look in /pub/usenet