Contributors: Ian T Zimmerman <itz@rahul.net>,
        Wayne Davison <trn@clari.net>, Goran Edvardsson <ge@inregia.se>

> In some newsgroups, I want to only read articles with specific subjects.
> So I have put the following in the killfiles for these groups:
>
> /^/j
> /foo/m
> /bar/m
>
> It works OK, except that trn seems _never_ to prepend a THRU line and so
> I keep getting month old articles on foo & bar back! what's the deal?

As mentioned in the command help, the 'm' command implies an 'r' modifier,
thus the commands are actually /foo/r:m and /bar/r:m -- both of which are
supposed to ignore the THRU line. Instead, with older versions of trn,
use:

/foo/-:M
/bar/-:M
/^/j

Newer versions make it simpler:

/foo/+
/bar/+
*X

This selects the items you're interested in and then (if you so desire)
the *X command tells trn to junk everything that isn't selected.  If you
leave it off you can read all of the selected articles first and then
browse through the remaining articles at your leisure. (Versions before
3.6 kept the remaining articles selected; but with 3.6, since you just
killed all non-selected articles there's no need to keep them selected.
If you just want to read them, press TAB (or 'Z').  Otherwise it is now
easier to browse through the remaining articles and select only the ones
you *really* want to read.)

[In general, the '*' kill file commands in later versions make it easier
to do certain article-killing things.  One such command is *j which
junks all of the unread articles, and the other is *X which junks all
but the selected articles.]

In other cases where you're selecting articles based on a pattern, you
may need to unset the -k switch (put "+k" in your .trninit). This tells
trn to observe the THRU line when processing selection searches (i.e.
searches with a command portion that starts with a '+' or a '.') in the
memorized commands (aka kill files). By default, trn runs with this
option set (-k), ignoring the THRU line for selection searches.

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End of trn newsreader FAQ, part 1/2.

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