Readme for Pronews/2 1.5x utilities
===================================

Clean-HEADERS-Index
===================
This is a quick and dirty utility that I wrote to cleanup
HEADERS.IDX after being used by the initial releases of Pronews/2
1.xx. There is a, well let's be charitable and call it a design
feature, in all versions of Pronews that leaves entries in the
headers index file, HEADERS.IDX for newsgroups that you had
previously subscribed to then unsubscribed from.

The CLNHDIDX.EXE utility can clean these unused entries up and
shrink the file again.

It's installed in your \PRONEWS directory (where PRONEWS.DLL
and HEADERS.IDX reside) as you install Pronews 1.5x and needs to
be run from there. It needs access to pronews.ini to work out
some settings. It can be run in several ways and takes two possible
switches:

/q      - run without asking any questions. Do what needs to be
          done and don't bother anyone by asking for permission.
          Dangerous!!

/show   - don't make any changes, just list the newsgroups in
          HEADERS.IDX and the names of their associated data
          files. Useful for those people who want to know which
          files go with which newsgroup.

You can't use both switches at the same time.

If you're not running /show, then Pronews/2 must be shutdown
before you run clnhdidx.exe. If you don't do this then it's very
likely that HEADERS.IDX will be replaced with the same duff data
that was in it before when you shutdown Pronews and it rewrites
the file. There's no check to make sure you have shut Pronews down
before you run this utility, it trusts you ;-)

Show HEADERS utility
====================
Another command line utility that is installed in your \PRONEWS
directory along with Pronews 1.5x. It will display information
from newsgroup header files and, optionally, display articles with
errors in their header information about all articles.

SHOWHEAD.EXE [/ALL] [/ERRORS] group.name

E.G. showhead comp.os.os2.apps

will display just the information from the files relating to the
group comp.os.os2.apps on all servers that you have that group. It
includes the names of the files for the groups it displays so you
can use this to work out what files belong to which groups.

The switches:

/ERRORS   - reads each article header in the index file for the
            group and performs some validity checking on it. It
            checks that the dates are valid and that the various
            fields within each index entry do not exceed their
            maximum length. For articles which have errors it will
            list them.

/ALL      - dumps the header index information for all the articles
            within the group. This is usually meaningless information
            unless you have a problem that needs to be fixed and you
            probably don't need to use this switch unless you have a
            problem to report.

The two switches are mutually incompatible and neither are required.

Trevor.
