Ubuntu Manpage: rnews - Inject individual articles and UUCP batches into INN

NAME

       rnews - Inject individual articles and UUCP batches into INN

SYNOPSIS

       rnews [-NUv] [-h host] [-P port] [-rS server] [file]

DESCRIPTION

rnews injects either individual articles or UUCP-style article batches into an INN server.
It submits articles via IHAVE and is suitable for injecting articles received from other
sources; local postings should generally use inews(1) instead. It is also used to process
spooled messages created by, for example, nnrpd while innd is not available.

The message is read from file if given, or standard input if no file is given. Articles
are sent to the server given in the -r or -S command line options if given, otherwise to
the server set via nnrpdposthost in inn.conf, otherwise to the local server.

When sent over UUCP, Usenet articles are typically collected in a single batch to reduce
the UUCP overhead. Batches can also be compressed to reduce communication time. If the
input to rnews does not begin with the characters "#!", it is taken to be a single news
article; otherwise, the first line of the input is interpreted as a batch command.

If the batch command is:

#! rnews <number>

then the next <number> bytes (starting with the next line) are read as a news article.
After that article is processed, the next line is again treated as a batch command.

If the command is:

#! cunbatch

then the rest of the input is fed to "gzip -d" to uncompress it, and then the resulting
uncompressed output is re-read as if it were the original input to rnews. A compressed
batch should therefore start with this line and contain a batch of articles separated by
"#! rnews" lines and then compressed with compress(1). (Batches compressed with gzip(1)
should instead use "gunbatch" as the batch command; INN just uses gzip rather than
compress because it can handle compress-style compression but is more widely available,
due to old patent issues, than compress.)

Otherwise, if the command is any other word, then rnews will try to execute a program with
that name, looking for it in the directory pathbin/rnews.libexec. The rest of the batch
will be fed to that program's standard input, and the standard output from the program
will be treated as if it were the original input to rnews. INN comes with three such
standard batch processors:

bunbatch
It invokes bzip2 and should be used for batches compressed with bzip2.

c7unbatch
It undoes an ASCII encoding to recover the original binary compressed stream and then
decompresses it as explained above.

gunbatch
It invokes gzip and should be used for batches compressed with gzip.

By default, rnews will log and discard any articles that are rejected by the server or
cannot be parsed by rnews for some reason (such as a missing header). This default can be
changed when compiling INN by setting DO_RNEWS_SAVE_BAD in include/inn/options.h. There
is no way to change it at runtime, unfortunately.

OPTIONS

-h host
If -h is given, rnews will log the message ID and host via syslog for each article
that it offers to the server. This is used in conjunction with a UUCP feed to get a
log of the messages received via that feed. This will also be done if the environment
variable UU_MACHINE is set, but will only be done if host is not an empty string.
(You can therefore turn off logging even if UU_MACHINE will be set by passing the flag
"-h ''" to rnews.)

-N Normally, if unpacking the input batch fails, it is re-spooled to pathincoming for
another attempt later. If the -N flag is given, no such re-spooling is done and rnews
will instead exit with status 9 if unpacking fails.

-P port
Use port as the server port to connect to rather than nnrpdpostport (as set in
inn.conf). Note that this value is only used if rnews does not connect to the local
server (in other words, when -r or -S is given or nnrpdposthost is set).

-r server, -S server
-r and -S are synonymous. If either is given, articles will be sent to server rather
than using the local server, overriding also the setting of nnrpdposthost in inn.conf.

-U If the server is not available, both rnews and nnrpd will spool posts to new files in
the pathincoming directory (as specified in inn.conf). When rnews is invoked with the
-U option, it scans that directory and processes all spooled messages found there
whose filenames do not begin with ".", attempting to send them to the server again.
It's a good idea to run this periodically out of cron to pick up any articles spooled
due to temporary server unavailability.

BUGS

       rnews cannot process articles that have embedded nul characters in them.  (Neither can the
       rest of INN at present.)

HISTORY