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Here are a few programs I use for saving news articles and the like.
All the code contained here (as far as I wrote it :-) is hereby placed
in the public domain -- feel free to steal it, remove all comments, add
your own name as author, add a few bugs of your own, and sell it for lots
of $$, as long as you don't keep me responsible.

	Guido van Rossum, CWI, Amsterdam <guido@mcvax.uucp>

The most important aspect of saving stuff is not storing it (that's easy
enough) but being able to find it back again later.  The program
'search' is for finding back articles.  It will search a default
directory or a list of files and directories for articles matching a
simple search criterion, and format the matching files in one of many
ways.  Since there is no manual page, here is at least a list of options
to 'search'.  Note that all string comparisons are made case independent
(but not [yet] with regular expressions).


search [options] ... [file|directory] ...

Matching options:
	-m key:string	Match criterion; a file matches if it has a
			header line with a keyword starting with 'key'
			and containing 'string' as a substring
			furtheron.  Default is "-m :", meaning all
			articles match.  Only the last -m parameter is
			honoured.

Formatting options:
	-f		Print file name of matching files.
	-h		Print the entire header.
	-b		Print the article's body.
	-a		Print the entire article (equivalent to -bh).
	-k key		Print header lines with a keyword starting with
			'key'.  If -h or -a is also specified, *don't*
			print such lines.

If no output options are given, "-k Subject" is used (otherwise the
output would be empty).  If more than one output option is given, a
blank line is inserted between output for each article.

Processing options:
	-p		Pipe the output for a single article through a
			paging program: $PAGER, or "more" if $PAGER is
			not set.
	-e		After the normal output for an article is
			produced, edit it using the editor specified in
			$EDITOR, or $VISUAL, or "vi" if neither is set.

File specification options:
	file|directory	All non-option arguments are treated as files
			or directories to search for matches.  If a
			directory is named, every file it contains is
			searched, and all its subdirectories are
			processed recursively.  If no files or
			directories are given, the directory $SAVE is
			searched, or $HOME/News/save if $SAVE is not
			set.


I also like to change the header a bit when I save an article; this is
done by the shell script "save.sh" and the program "munge".  I believe
these speak for themselves.  I an a fervent "rn" user, so I put the
following macro in my .rnmac file:
	S	!save %A\012


Note that maybe the most important part of this posting is the set of
generally useable routines for processing article headers, case-
independent conparisons and a few other things, contained in the
subdirectory "lib".

A hint on more complicated searches than the 'one-criterion' searches
implemented by search: I routinely do something like

	F=`search -f -m :foobar`

to find articles that have to do with "foobar", and then list them or
make a subselection with

	search <other options> $F

Similarly, you can 'or' matches together with something like

	F=`{ search -f -m <match1>; search -f -m <match2>; } | sort -u`
	search <format options> $F


Installation notes:
	cd lib
	make
	cd ..
	make all
	# play with it
	make install	# this moves the files to $HOME/bin

You need getopt and readdir+friends to compile this, which should not be
a problem if you have previously archived net.sources.  It's only been
tested on a VAX running 4.3 BSD but I don't see why it wouldn't work
elsewhere if you've got getopt and readdir c.s.
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