Ubuntu Manpage: rnews - receive news from a UUCP connection

NAME

       rnews - receive news from a UUCP connection

SYNOPSIS

       rnews [ -h host ] [ -v ] [ -U ] [ -N ] [ -S master ] [ input ]

DESCRIPTION

Rnews reads messages typically queued by a UUCP newsfeed and sends them to the local
InterNetNews server. The message is read from the specified input file, or standard input
if no input is named.

When sent over UUCP, Usenet articles are typically joined in a single batch to reduce the
UUCP overhead. Batches can also be compressed, to reduce the communication time. If a
message does not start with a number sign (``#'') and an exclamation point, then the
entire input is taken as a single news article. If it does start with with those two
characters, then the first line is read and interpreted as a batch command.

If the command is ``#! rnews nnn'' where nnn is a number, then the next nnn bytes
(starting with the next line) are read as a news article.

If the command is ``#! cunbatch'' then the rest of input is fed to the compress(1) program
with the ``-d'' flag to uncompress it, and the output of this pipe is read as rnews's
input. This is for historical compatibility — there is no program named cunbatch. A
compressed batch will start with a ``#! cunbatch'' line, then contain a series of articles
separated by ``#! rnews nnn'' lines.

If the command is any other word, then rnews will try to execute a program with that name
in the directory /usr/lib/news/rnews. The batch will be fed into the program's standard
input, and the standard output will be read back as input into rnews.

If rnews detects any problems with an article such as a missing header, or an
unintelligible reply from the server, it will save a copy of the article in the
/var/spool/news/in.coming/bad directory.

OPTIONS

-S If the ``-S'' flag is used, then rnews will connect to the specified host. If the
flag is not used, it will try to connect to the server by opening a Unix-domain
stream connection. If that fails, it will try to open a TCP connection to the
default remote server.

-U If the server is not available, the message is spooled into a new file created in
the /var/spool/news/in.coming directory. The ``-U'' flag may be used to send all
spooled messages to the server once it becomes available again, and can be invoked
regularly by cron(8).

-N Normally, if unpacking the input fails it is re-spooled to
/var/spool/news/in.coming for another attempt later. If the ``-N'' flag is used
then no such re-spooling is done and rnews exits with status value ``9'' to
indicate this.

-v If the ``-v'' flag is used, it will print a notice of all errors on the standard
error, naming the input file (if known) and printing the first few characters of
the input. Errors are always logged through syslog(3).

-h If the ``-h'' flag is given, or failing that, the enviroment variable UU_MACHINE is
set, then rnews will log the Message-ID, and host, for each article offered to the
server via syslog(3). Logging will only be done if the value is not an empty
string.

BUGS

       Rnews cannot process articles that have embedded \0's in them.

HISTORY