3.128 on ListServ, part 3 (82)
Willard McCarty (MCCARTY@VM.EPAS.UTORONTO.CA)
Thu, 15 Jun 89 22:11:54 EDT
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 3, No. 128. Thursday, 15 Jun 1989.
Date: Thu, 15 Jun 89 15:04:48 IST
From: David Sitman <A79@TAUNIVM>
Subject: Listserv and lists, part 3
Files and filelists
In addition to managing discussion lists, Listserv also has fileserver
capabilities, i.e., it can send files to users upon request. Willard
makes wide use of this capability, and a large number of files of
interest to Humanists is available from Toronto's Listserv.
To get the listing of the files connected to HUMANIST which are
available, send the following command to LISTSERV@UTORONTO (see my
previous posting on sending commands to Listserv):
INDEX HUMANIST
Here are the first few lines of the 'meaty' part of the listing:
* rec last - change
* filename filetype GET PUT -fm lrecl nrecs date time File description
* -------- -------- --- --- --- ----- ----- -------- -------- ----------------
ACH_ALLC MESSAGE ALL OWN V 71 234 87/10/15 15:01:49
ACL CONFRNCE ALL OWN V 80 579 89/04/03 00:04:07 June 1989
ADVANCES JOURNAL ALL OWN V 73 191 88/10/06 07:24:15 E. Nissan
AI SYMPOSUM ALL OWN V 80 94 89/01/05 19:05:58 June 1989
The names of the files follow the IBM CMS file naming convention. They
consist of two parts (filename and filetype) each of which is from
one to eight characters long. The 'GET' column indicates who can request
the file from Listserv. ALL means that anyone, Humanists and
non-Humanists alike, can get the file. Willard could mark a file as PRV
(for private) instead of ALL, and then only HUMANIST list members would
be able to get that file. That might be a good idea for the biography
files. The 'PUT' column determines who can send a new copy of a file to
the filelist. At present only the list owners are able to do this. The
next several columns give information on the file. This information is
updated automatically by Listserv when it associates the file with the
filelist. The length of the file's records (basically, records=lines)
can be fixed or variable, lrecl is the length of the records and nrecs
is the number of records. Listserv updates the time and date; the owner
supplies the file description. Note that the file description goes past
column 80. That means that on some systems the description will be cut.
The command for requesting that Listserv send you a file is:
GET filename filetype name_of_filelist
In our case the name_of_filelist is, of course, HUMANIST.
The 'filelist' name for a file need not be the 'real' name of the file
on the computer. Listserv has a method for associating a name from a
filelist with a real name in the computer. When the filelist name and
real name are the same, Listserv will be able to find the file even if
you do not give the name_of_filelist. E.g., both:
GET AI SYMPOSIUM HUMANIST
and:
GET AI SYMPOSIUM
should work. As far as I know, in the Humanist filelist, the filelist
name is always the real name. By the way, SEND and SENDME are synonyms
of GET.
If you send your GET commands as mail, then Listserv will send you the
file as mail. If you send commands as a file or interactive message,
the file will be sent as a file, using the default format (NETDATA,
PUNCH, etc.) for your node.
David Sitman
Computation Center
Tel Aviv University