NAME

       statnews - generate some useful statistics out of a newsgroup

SYNOPSIS

       statnews [OPTIONS] NEWSGROUP

DESCRIPTION

       The statnews command get some useful statistics out of a newsgroup.  It displays things
       like how many articles each author posted, how many characters was written, how many lines
       were quoted, how many articles belong to each thread, the number of messages/characters
       per day, the average message length, and so on.

OPTIONS

       --capitalize(*)
           Whether to capitalize the name of both the sender and the receiver of each message
           (default is "--capitalize": yes).  This option is useful to collect "AUTHOR" together
           with "author", "Author", and "AuThor".

       --dotted(*)
           Whether to translate "." to "/" in NEWSGROUP (default is "--nodotted": does
           translate).  This option may be useful if your system stores each newsgroup in a
           dedicate directory (e.g., news.useless.group) instead that by hierarchy (e.g.,
           news/useless/group), or if your system has a news archive stored this way.

       --from=DATE
           Set the date statistics start from (DATE format is "dd/mm/yyyy", GMT).

       --help
           Display the help summary.

       --spooldir=SPOOLDIR
           Search NEWSGROUP in SPOOLDIR (default is /var/spool/news/articles/).

       --to=DATE
           Set the date statistics end by (DATE format is "dd/mm/yyyy", GMT).

       --width=WIDTH
           Set the terminal width to WIDTH columns (default is 80, with a minimum of 70).

       Options may be conveniently abbreviated and prefixed by "-" instead of "--"; the "=" may
       be omitted or substituted with one or more blanks.

       Options listed with (*) may be negated by adding the prefix "no" in front of them (e.g.,
       "--dotted" => "--nodotted").

RETURN VALUE

       The statnews command returns 0 on success and a positive integer on errors.

ENVIRONMENT

       The environment variable STATNEWS can hold a set of default options for statnews.

       These options are interpreted first by the program and can be overridden by explicit
       command line parameters.  For example:

       sh: "STATNEWS="--nocapital --width=132"; export STATNEWS"

       csh:
           "setenv STATNEWS "--nocapital --width=132""

FILES

       The default spool directory is /var/spool/news/articles/.

SEE ALSO

       rn(1), readnews(1).

BUGS

       There are no known bugs.

UNRESTRICTIONS

       This program is copylefted.  Refer to the GNU General Public License for conditions of
       use.

AUTHOR

       This program has been written and is actively maintained by Davide Giovanni Maria Salvetti
       <salve@debian.org>.

HISTORY

       This program was originally aimed for use with FidoNet style echo areas under Debian
       GNU/Linux.  It can be successfully used with Usenet newsgroups as well.  More precisely,
       it can be used with every message base that stores one message per file in some directory
       in traditional mbox format.