Thanks for your feedback so far. We get an average of about 10 renames a
month which, when you include my time in running and overseeing the script,
plus our helpline's time in dealing with the call and updating our
databases, it's enough to warrant an automation.
Many of our lists are named after departments or projects related to higher
education, and as you can probably imagine, that is in a constant state of
flux.. Projects get renamed to breath fresh life into them, departments
develop a new image, etc.
Most of the lists we rename certainly want to keep their subscribers, and
many their notebooks aswell (although, in the case of the notebooks, I
suspect in most cases they probably wouldn't miss them!).
I'm leaning towards using wa.exe at the moment. With the standard
http::request module in Perl, when you get a URL it stores the response in a
flat file which you can then analyse to deduce whether it's been succsessful
or not. Just I will need to sort out the problems I had with certain
characters.

Regards

--
Spencer Warhurst
Listserv Service Manager


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Margaret King [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: 05 February 2002 14:27
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Renaming lists & header updates via script
>
>
> Stan Horwitz wrote:
>
> > Since I only get one or two requests to rename a list per
> year, I do not
> > have a lot of motivation to automate the process. In most
> cases, I simply
> > tell our Help Desk people to delete the list, then create
> another list if
> > they need to rename a list since usually, the subscription
> entries and
> > notebooks are no longer needed.
>
> I don't have anything automated either, although I get more requests
> than that.  Often when people ask me to rename a list, what
> they really
> want is to get a new list configured like their old one,
> without having
> to fill out a form specifying configuration options.  As Stan says,
> many of them don't want the subscribers or notebooks brought over.  So
> I tell people they can skip our form if they can specify another list
> on our server that I can model their new list after (whether or not
> that list belongs to them and/or is to be deleted after being used as
> a model).  I get maybe three or four in a year that actually want to
> move the subscribers and notebooks, which I do manually.
>
> Margaret King
> Michigan State University
>