Folks;
Ok, I'll admit it. I can shell script, but arch_retrieve has me crossing my eyes and praying for salvation. While I struggle to chart and understand the complete flow of the script, I'm curious to know if anyone here has made modifications to it (not extensions through the retrieve.local mech) they are willing to share as learning tools. A few things that come to mind (in no particular order) are:
1) Ignoring maxfiles; having a guy set maxfiles to 0 and then requesting a few hundred files is probably not a good thing.
2) Disabling body commands, and limiting to a single subject command. (Ok, this is a little silly, but might be useful for underpowered servers.)
3) Limiting ls/get on a per-directory basis. The latest/ directory in an interactive list contains the archives...but for a digested list it contains the parts for the _next_ issue, and I'm not sure it's a great idea to allow subscribers to arbitrarily pull latest/digest.body. (A great reuse of an existing directory that, in retrospect, was probably _not_ the way to go - I'd argue the digest build should be outside the archive tree. But that's an issue for the digest shell script instead, so nevermind.)
4) Dropping searches. Again, a little silly, but I could imagine some situations where I'd want to restrict or remove searches.
I'm certain there are other possible modifications I haven't thought about that someone might have found useful; I'd think almost anything would be helpful in learning how to alter the behavior of arch_retrieve.
Charlie