🚀 go-pugleaf

Rebecca and Rowland <real-address-in-sig@rhu.barb.foobar> wrote:

> Paul Womar <{$PW$}@pwomar.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> > I have found that when I get the list of New group from the news server
> > that many appear for several sessions and so are added to my newsgroups
> > list many times over thus making it quite a bit longer than it should
> > be, is there any program that will easily strip out the duplicates, it's
> > a normal text file, alphabetically sorted with one entry per, any ideas?
> 
> Off the top of my head, I can't think of an *easy* solution.  You could
> do the job with A.N.Other programming language; Applescript and the
> Scriptable Text Editor; tcl within the Alpha text editor; or Mac Perl
> spring to mind as obvious possibilities.

Even easier - fire up Excel[1] and do an "Extract Distinct" (IIRC, on
v4[2]) or a "Data Filter:Advanced filter:Unique records only"(v5) on the
file.

The real Q&D approach is just to open it in Excel, sort and eyeball
search for duplicates and delete those rows.

rgds, Alan
[1] Yes, even I use Excel, but it's almost always for this sort of text
manipulation 'cos I'm too lazy to write some Perl and haven't used MPW
Shell for years....
[2] 'tho if it's a list of all groups, ISTR v4 Barfs at >16K rows..
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