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