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