On Tue, 5 Feb 2002, Warhurst, SI (Spencer) wrote:

> Hi
>
> I've kind of been down this road before, but wondered if anyone out there
> has since also been down this route too & might have some useful feedback.
>
> At the moment, when I rename a list, I use a script I wrote in Perl which
> follows the guidelines in the Site Manager's manual. I want to revise the
> script, since it is an old one when I was first learning Perl, and one of
> the aspects that bothers me is updating the headers.
>
> At that stage of the process, I have two list headers I need to send to
> Listserv. One is the old header, with the new-list= redirector line in it,
> and the other is the new list header. I currently use Blat and email the
> headers to Listserv. However, this is not a terribly efficient process.
> Firstly, it's not very easy to trap errors from an external program like
> Blat, so I don't. I get Blat to send me a copy of what it's sending to
> Listserv, manually check it's formed OK, and then wait for Listserv itself
> to send the "list header successfully replaced" message, so that I know it's
> worked.
>
> So, how do you other site administrators rename lists? I've looked at that
> Rexx script and the developers guide, but I don't know Rexx & it doesn't
> look very straight forward either. Nor do I know anything about system-level
> programming (ie: sockets & stuff like that). I could possibly send the
> update command to wa.exe, and in fact one of my other scripts for creating
> new lists does that. However, I had problems sending certain characters in
> the URLs query string and had to work around it in a bit of a messy way. Any
> ideas?

Check the release notes for the lcmd utility's information. This may prove
useful to you. I haven't used it for renaming lists, but it has come in
handy for list reporting. It might be very useful in your application.
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.