On Fri, 15 Jul 1994 00:24:15 -0500 Winship <[log in to unmask]> said:
 
>The  scenario   is  that   a  subscriber  did   a  number   of  searches
>interactively. Her  problem was she could  not always get the  items she
>wanted sent back  to her. Never having worked interactively  on BITNET I
>couldn't  advise her  as to  what might  be the  problem (I've  read the
>instructions,  but often  I  don't  *really* understand  until  I do  it
>myself).
 
She probably forgot to type 'SEND'  before the PRINT command. With LDBASE
you can only  access small amounts of data interactively  - enough to let
you decide whether this is what you want. Once you are confident that you
found the right messages,  you can use SEND PRINT (or  SEND INDEX or SEND
whatever) to get the  whole thing via mail. The reason  it works this way
is that BITNET won't send any  mail traffic until all interactive traffic
has been  sent (now you can  configure things differently, but  the basic
principle still stands).  So, you don't want to let  people get megabytes
of data  interactively, which  anyway is  probably going to  be due  to a
mistake.
 
>// Job Echo=No
>Database Search DD=Rules
>//Rules DD *
>s * in listname since yy/mm/dd
>p 1987 2938 4307 5910 6101 10345 10756
>/*
 
That's  correct. You  can  scrap the  SINCE clause  since  you have  item
numbers. This will save some I/O because it won't have to run through the
index skipping items before the specified date.
 
>This job naturally took  a long time since it covered a  year and a half
>of the database.
 
This  is because  the algorithm  used isn't  efficient when  extracting a
small amount of items from a large  search result. This has been fixed in
1.8b. With the new code this doesn't eat any CPU time at all.
 
There are a number of circumventions,  but none of them is convenient for
the example  you mentioned, where the  items are spread in  a wide range.
The only way to save cycles with the base 1.8a code is to use:
 
s * in listname.1987,2938,4307,5910,6101,10345,10756
print
 
(watch the punctuation carefully) This isn't convenient, but it's not the
syntax you're supposed to use.
 
  Eric