NAME

       nngoback - make news articles unread on a day-by-day basis (nn)

SYNOPSIS

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

DESCRIPTION

       nngoback will rewind the .newsrc record file of nn(1) one or more days.  It can be used to
       rewind all groups, or only a specified set of groups.  In other words, nngoback  can  mark
       news articles which have arrived on the system during the last days days unread.

       Only  subscribed groups that occur in the current presentation sequence are rewound.  That
       means that if no group arguments are specified,  all  groups  occurring  in  the  sequence
       defined  in  the  init  file will be rewound.  Otherwise, only the groups specified on the
       argument line will be rewound.

       When a group is rewound, the information about selections, partially read digests etc. are
       discarded.  It will print notifications about this unless the -Q (quiet) option is used.

       If  the  -i  (interactive)  option  is  specified,  nngoback will report for each how many
       articles can be marked unread, and ask for confirmation before going back in that group.

       If the -v (verbose) option is specified, nngoback will report how many articles are marked
       unread.

       If  the  -N  (no-update)  option  is  specified,  nngoback  will perform the entire goback
       operation, but not update the .newsrc file.

       If you are not up-to-date with your news reading, you can also use nngoback to catch up to
       only have the last few days of news waiting to be read in the following way:
            nn -a0
            nngoback 3
       The  nn  command  will mark all articles in all groups as read (answer all to the catch-up
       question.)  The following nngoback will then make the  last  three  days  of  news  unread
       again.

       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.)

THE BACK_ACT DAEMON

       It is a prerequisite for the use of nngoback that the script back_act is  executed  at  an
       appropriate  time  once  (and only once) every day.  Preferably this is done by cron right
       before the bacth of news for `today' is received.  back_act will maintain  copies  of  the
       active file for the last 14 days.

       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 which case keeping more than 7 days of active file copies is wasteful.

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.

SEE ALSO

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

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.

AUTHOR

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