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Please save this message!!



I have some confessions to make.  I've always said that I didn't want
to make archives of this list available because it would take up time
and disk space for me to learn how to create them and also to maintain
them.  Although I didn't know the specifics until yesterday, I learned
early on that creating archives isn't that difficult with listproc.
The storage issue wasn't really a problem either because, chatty as we
are, I've saved every interaction listproc has ever had, and I'm still
not concerned that I'm running out of space.

So, I've finally bitten the bullet and made ALL dinosaur list material
freely available.  I'll ask that you not abuse the privilege... During
the past year my above concerns were gradually replaced by the concern
that if I made the archive available, people accessing it would put a
real drain on this system's rather limited resources.  If that gets to
be a problem, I will remove the archives again.  My hope at this point
is that by giving you access to them, I'll actually have the opposite
effect.  For instance, how many times has the Hunteria reference been
posted for Utahraptor?  Well, I can't answer that immediately, but I
can tell you that Utahraptor has been mentioned 107 times on this list
since Feb 1, 1994 (mostly in subject lines... we seem to drift a bit
:-) How do I know that?

Well, what follows is both an answer to that question and a
description of the most efficient way to use the archives.  First off,
remember that ALL commands relevant to the dinosaur list and its
archives should be sent to:

listproc@lepomis.psych.upenn.edu

So, to find out about utahraptor, I sent the command:

search dinosaur utahraptor

In response, listproc sent me a file containing several entries of the
form:

Matches for pattern utahraptor ...

--- Archive: dinosaur (path: pub/dinosaur) 

>>> File feb94, part 1:
1993, and Utahraptor, discovered in the United States in 1992 ... Each
I am not entirely sure, could it be Utahraptor, the new, large,
<<< End of matches in file feb94

>>> File mar94, part 5:
Hold on there, don't we mean Utahraptor? Besides the point is that
Re: Velociraptor vs Utahraptor in Jurassic Park
reasons.  Utahraptor was not discovered until the movie of JP was several
<<< End of matches in file mar94

[rest deleted for brevity -- MR]

Now, let's say that you were interested in the discovery of
Utahraptor.  Somebody wrote something relevant in February of 1994.
To extract the file that contains that message, you would send
listproc the command:

get dinosaur feb94 1

The 'search' uses "egrep like" pattern matching.  It is not
case-sensitive.  For more information on the search command, send the
command:

help search

The 'get' command takes the archive name, the filename and the part
number as arguments.  Please look over the above section to see how I
generated the sample command if it's not already perfectly clear.  For
additional information about 'get', send listproc the command:

help get

As of now, all files in the archive are listed under the archive name
dinosaur.  I could break it up into dinosaur-94 and dinosaur-95 or
something similar if searches return more information than you want.
Also, currently all of the files represent one month's worth of
dinosaur mail (except for apr95).  In the future, the list will be
archiving all digests.  That means that until and unless I set up a
different system, files will generally represent one day's worth of
mail.  I suspect that I will combine them at the end of each month.
As of now, the last file accessible is apr1to1995 (that is, April 1 to
19, 1995).  I think that the apr2095 file will not be available until
this afternoon.  That's when I'll find out if the automated part
works.

One final caveat...  I thought creating the archives would be hard
because I expected listproc to want to receive or be told how to
create the files in a particular format.  That turns out not to be the
case.  The only thing listproc does is compress and chop up into
smaller parts any files that you give it.  That means that, for
example, when you retrieve a file it may begin and/or end in the
middle of a message.  It also means that the older messages have all
kinds of extraneous header information and don't look at all pretty.
The digests have some nicer formatting applied to them before they are
created, so archives made today or later will contain less information
in each message header, and there will be clear demarcations between
messages.

Please feel free (within reason) to make use of this resource, and
complain to me if you think I'm doing something awful by immortalizing
everything you've written to the list...

-- 
Mickey Rowe     (rowe@lepomis.psych.upenn.edu)