NNGOBACK(1)

✨ NNGOBACK(1) ✨

okay bestie, welcome to nngoback 💖 — it lives in the General Commands Manual and it is literally the time machine of your newsreader. no cap.

🌸 NAME 🌸

nngoback — make news articles unread on a day-by-day basis, for nn 💅

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

nngoback [ -NQvi ] [-d] days [ group ]...

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so here's the tea 🍓: nngoback rewinds the .newsrc record file of nn(1) by one or more days. it can rewind all the groups, or only a specific set of groups. in other words, nngoback can mark news articles that arrived on the system during the last days days as unread. it's giving "undo my whole week" energy 😭

only subscribed groups that occur in the current presentation sequence get rewound. which means: if you pass no group arguments, every group in the sequence defined in the init file gets rewound. if you do pass group arguments, only the groups you named on the argument line get rewound. periodt.

when a group is rewound, the info about selections, partially read digests, etc. is discarded. 💀 it will print notifications about all that unless you use the -Q (quiet) option.

if you use the -i (interactive) option, nngoback will report, for each group, how many articles can be marked unread, and it'll ask for confirmation before going back in that group. consent king 👑

if you use the -v (verbose) option, nngoback will report how many articles are marked unread. very demure, very mindful 📢

if you use the -N (no-update) option, nngoback will perform the entire goback operation, but it will not update the .newsrc file. it's a rehearsal, bestie 🎭

if you're not up-to-date with your news reading, you can also use nngoback to catch up so that only the last few days of news are waiting to be read, like this:

nn -a0
nngoback 3

the nn command marks all articles in all groups as read (answer all to the catch-up question). then the nngoback after it makes the last three days of news unread again. iconic behavior ✨

🎀 Examples 🎀

• nngoback 0 mark the articles which have arrived today as unread.
• nngoback 1 mark the articles which have arrived yesterday and today as unread.
• nngoback 6 mark the articles which have arrived during the last week as unread.

🚨 you cannot go more than 14 days back with nngoback. (you can change this limit as described below, iykyk.)

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🌈 THE BACK_ACT DAEMON 🌈

it is a prerequisite for using nngoback that the script back_act is executed at an appropriate time once (and only once) every day. ideally cron does it right before the batch of news for today is received. back_act maintains copies of the active file for the last 14 days. it's the backbone of the whole operation, no cap 🫶

optionally, the back_act program accepts a single numerical argument specifying how many copies of the active file it should maintain. this is useful if news is expired after 7 days — in that case, keeping more than 7 days of active file copies is just wasteful. slay, reduce reuse recycle ♻️

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💜 FILES 💜

• ~/.newsrc — the record of read articles.
• ~/.newsrc.goback — the original rc file before goback.
• $db/active.N — the N days old active file.
• $master/back_act — script run by cron to maintain old active files.

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🧚 SEE ALSO 🧚

nn(1), nncheck(1), nngrab(1), nngrep(1), nnpost(1), nntidy(1), nnadmin(1M), nnusage(1M), nnmaster(8)

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⭐ NOTES ⭐

nngoback does not check the age of the old active files. it will blindly believe that active.0 was created today, and that active.7 is really seven days old! 🙈 therefore, the back_act script should be run once and only once every day for nngoback to work properly.

😭 the days are counted relative to the time the active files were copied. so if back_act gets skipped or run twice, everything downstream is delulu. be careful bestie.

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Kim F. Storm, Texas Instruments A/S, Denmark E-mail: storm@texas.dk

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and that's the whole page, bestie 💅 this came to you from the 4th Berkeley Distribution, Release 6.7.5 🦋 — go forth and rewind your news, mwah 💖✨