Problem with vnews (B news 2.11.19) on AT&T 3B2 running SVR3.2

[Larry Lippman]

	After having been publicly humiliated for running an early version
of B news 2.11 in the recent news.admin site survey :-), we upgraded to
the latest patchlevel of 2.11.19.  We have several 3B2's on an internal
network ranging from 300's to 400's to 500's, all of which run SVR3.2.

	So far, the 2.11.19 news version seems to be okay for a problem
with vnews.  The  "f" followup and "!" shell escape function are broken.
After some playing with sdb, the problem appears related to the function
shcmd() which in turn calls the function prun() which in turn performs
an execve(2) to either invoke postnews or the shell command.

	I diddled with the above code in visual.c but did not make any
immediate progress in further localizing the problem.  This problem is
evident on *all* of the 3B2's, even with individual machine compilations.

	I am hoping that some kind soul has run into this problem before
and can point me in the right direction.

	Also, in case anyone is wondering, I have been using vnews since
November of 1984 when my organization first joined the Net.  I *like* vnews
for its simplicity, and often use it for remote access in preference to
rn, trn and nn - all of which, btw, have been successfully installed on
our 3B2's.

Larry Lippman @ Recognition Research Corp.  "Have you hugged your cat today?"
VOICE: 716/688-1231       {boulder, rutgers, watmath}!ub!kitty!larry
FAX:   716/741-9635   [note: ub=acsu.buffalo.edu] uunet!/      \aerion!larry