Ubuntu Manpage: rnews - Inject individual articles and UUCP batches

Provided by: inn2-inews_2.7.2~20240212-1build3_amd64

NAME

       rnews - Inject individual articles and UUCP batches

SYNOPSIS

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

DESCRIPTION

rnews injects either individual articles or UUCP-style article batches into a local or
remote news 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.

If authentication credentials are present for the remote server in the passwd.nntp file in
pathetc, then rnews will use them to authenticate.

The message is read from file if given, spooled files (with the -U flag) 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 at "127.0.0.1", and finally to the server set via server in inn.conf.

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 and the -a flag is not given, 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.

OPTIONS

-a By default, rnews looks for additional unpackers in the rnews.libexec sub-directory of
pathbin (as set in inn.conf). If -a is given, no additional batch processor will be
used; only "rnews" and "cunbatch" will be recognized as valid batch commands.

-b 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 field). If -b is
given, rejected articles will also be backed up in the bad sub-directory of
pathincoming (as set in inn.conf).

-d If -d is given, rnews will log via syslog the message-ID and the Path header field
body of each article rejected as a duplicate by the server.

-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.

-v Enable verbose mode, with more traces, notably logging the reason why articles are
rejected by the server.

BUGS

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

HISTORY