alternative partial archive of the news:comp.compilers USENET newsgroup

"What happened to the comp.compilers mbox archives?" say I myself.

"They're still on my server but since nobody had looked at them for years, I turned off FTP." answers Dr. John R Levine, Ph.D.

I did not find the non-mbox archives which were few hyperlinks away from HTTPS://compilers.IECC.com to be easy to search, so I made this back up. This back up is probably also not easy for you to search, but you can download it or you can download from John R Levine, and then use whatever suits you, e.g. grep.

I used
wget --input-file=URLs_for_comp.compilers_including_inexistent_articles.txt --output-file=Wget_logfile_for_comp.compilers_from_its_start_to_the_end_of_the_Year_2025.txt &

I do not update this archive, so if you want to download e.g. articles newer than the Year 2025 then you might adapt the script that I created to generate URLs_for_comp.compilers_including_inexistent_articles.txt.

Downloading from Dr. Levine was not fast because it involved downloading more than 440,303 non-existing articles which say e.g. "No such article in the archive as 98-12-073 in the archive."

This partial archive excludes most of the non-existing articles. Non-existing articles are not very harmful, but

  • downloading takes time so downloading from this website may be faster than downloading from HTTPS://compilers.IECC.com and
  • a shell or grep etc. may not work so well with an excessive amount of files in a single directory and
  • they might waste too much space. Cf. Wget said:

    "--2026-02-01 16:22:36--
    https://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/86-01-001
    Resolving compilers.iecc.com (compilers.iecc.com)... 192.55.226.148,
    2001:470:1f07:1126:7065:7373:696d:616c
    Connecting to compilers.iecc.com
    (compilers.iecc.com)|192.55.226.148|:443... connected.
    HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
    Length: unspecified [text/html]
    Saving to: ‘86-01-001’

    0K .. 83.3M=0s

    2026-02-01 16:22:37 (83.3 MB/s) - ‘86-01-001’ saved [2968]
    [. . .]
    2026-02-03 07:21:58 (6.42 MB/s) - ‘25-12-999’ saved [439]

    FINISHED --2026-02-03 07:21:58--
    Total wall clock time: 1d 14h 59m 22s
    Downloaded: 479520 files, 374M in 54s (6.92 MB/s)"
    but used six times as much space on the XFS filesystem to which I
    downlaoded these files as
    du --human-readable
    said:
    "2.2G ."
    for
    "du --block-size=1
    2307362816 .".

    (wc --bytes said 382891882 i.e. 365.2M.)

    du -h said "489M" on this XFS filesystem immediately after I ran delete_most_non-existent_articles_before_the_Year_2026.BASh.

    You might instead want to run delete_all_non-existent_articles_before_the_Year_2026.BASh.

    Seunadh

    Is ionann leantainn lèirsinne de fhaidhle seo agus deimhinneachadh chum as gu'n geall sibh fianaisean a thabhairt airson mo fhòrlaidh tro chàintean a-staigh taigh-òsta aig bàraichean iarainn.