NAME

       overchan - update the news overview database

SYNOPSIS

       overchan [ -D dir ] [ -c ] [ file...  ]

DESCRIPTION

       Overchan reads article data from files or standard input if none are specified.  (A single
       dash in the file list means to read standard input.)  It uses this information  to  update
       the news overview database.  Overchan is designed to be used by InterNetNews or the C News
       ``mkov'' packages to update the database as the articles come in.  The database  for  each
       newsgroup is stored in a file named .overview in a newsgroup directory within the overview
       database tree.

       Overchan locks the database file (by locking an auxiliary file) before appending  the  new
       data.  To purge data after articles have been expired, see expireover(8).

       By  default,  overchan  processes  its input as an INN overview stream written as a ``WO''
       entry in the newsfeeds(5) file, for example:

              overview:*:Tc,WO:/usr/lib/news/bin/overchan

       This data consists of a line of text, separated into two parts by a tab.  The  first  part
       is  a  list  of  all  relative pathnames where the article has been written, with a single
       space between entries.  The second part is the data to be written into the overview  file,
       except  that the initial article number is omitted.  The data in the overview files should
       be expired by running expireover(8).  This is normally done by adding  the  ``expireover''
       flag to the news.daily(8) invocation.

OPTIONS

       -c     To  process the output of the mkov(8) program, use the ``-c'' flag.  This format is
              described in the ``nov'' distribution.

       -D     The ``-D'' flag can be used to specify where the databases are stored.  The default
              directory is /var/spool/news/over.view.

HISTORY

       Written  by Rob Robertson <rob@violet.berkeley.edu> and Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for
       InterNetNews.  This is revision 1.9, dated 1996/10/29.

SEE ALSO

       expireover(8), news.daily(8), newsfeeds(5), newsoverview(5), newsoverview(8).

                                                                                      OVERCHAN(8)