validate USENET posts
 

I have a file with a lot of USENET posts.

I need a tool wich can validate the posts in this file and write a list of the valid posts.

the posts begins with:

From f.nurk@aol.com Fri Mar 11 10:28:59 2005
From: "Fred Nurk" <f.nurk@aol.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
References: <427df_1@news.tm.net.my> <38r7qF5sn4U7@individual.net>
Subject: Re: Find Linux OS Brand and Version
Date:Fri, 4 Mar 200517:38:35 +0100
MIME-Version: 1.0
++ some more header fields

the tool need to check that the message begins with these headers fields
, and if they do list them to std output.

any tips on how to begin such a tool?


sH

Very briefly, regular expressions. I'd write this tool in Perl, but Tcl would do too since it has good regexp support.

There's a regexp tutorial at http://analyser.oli.tudelft.nl/regex/index.html.en and information on Perl and Tcl at http://www.perl.org/ and http://www.tcl.tk/ respectively. Tcl is easier to pick up quickly if you don't know either language.

I don't think I'd try to tackle this with a shell script, although I know some die-hards who would.