Re: Removing gaps by moving articles from group x to group x doesn't work

[Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>]

Hannu Koivisto <azure@iki.fi> writes:

> Toby Speight <streapadair@gmx.net> writes:
> 
> | Ah, you don't have holes in the numbering, then?  Just that your
> | ticked articles aren't contiguous?
> 
> That's correct.
> 
> | That's not the problem the renumbering aims to solve.
> 
> Um, well, I didn't know that incontiguous ticked articles cause a
> wrong article count to be displayed as well.  So how should I fix
> this problem, then?

Hannu has clearly highlighted a long standing problem that has lead to
hundreds, probably thousands of posts in the last few years concering
the inaccurate message counts supplied by gnus.

Seems there would be some easy way to reset that group count number.
Especially in mail groups where the file numbers aren't as important.

I'm probably overlooking obvious problems but it seems to me a simple
call to `ls |wc -l' and then using that number to reset should be a
handy command somewhere in mail group commands.  Or maybe a secondary
number could be shown that is the `real' external  messages count kept
separate from gnus counting scheme.

How does one insert a user prompt into a simple `defun'  I think I'd
like to have one that does this:

 (defun hp-count-group ()
   "Run ls |wc -l on selected group" 
   (interactive)
   (shell-command "ls |wc -l" nil nil))

How would I insert something that prompts me for a group name in the above.