news readers with linux

[Geoff Shang]

On Mon, 21 Jan 2002, Deedra Waters wrote:

> I'm using pine to look at news groups. right now, the two that I look at,
> pine keeps taking attachments, and puttin them in the message, is there a
> way to change this? or is there a better news reader I can use so that I
> won't have this problem?

I'm presuming you're referring to things like this:

begin 600 popsong.mp3

Followed by random-looking text.  This is not pine's fault, this is how it
was posted.  This is what's called uuencoding.  This turns a binary file
into text so that you can do just this - post it in a message.  this is
pretty old technology, but is guaranteed to be backward compatibal.

You can unpack such files by exporting the text to a text file, stripping
off the extraneous headers and footers (if there are any), and then runing
it through uudecode.  The filename is stipulated in the begin line of the
uuencoded file (as shown above), and so are the permissions (that's the
600, 755 is also common).  The named file will be created by uudecode in
your current directory.

The reason why pine can't deal with these internally is that often in
newsgroups, the posting is split across several articles and one has to
find all the pieces and reassemble them before decoding.  If you're missing
a piece, you're probably hosed, depending on what the file is.

Geoff.