Ubuntu Manpage: scanspool - Perform a sanity scan over all articles in news spool

NAME

       scanspool - Perform a sanity scan over all articles in news spool

SYNOPSIS

       scanspool [-cnv] [-a active-file] [-s spool-dir]

DESCRIPTION

scanspool is a Perl script for use with a tradspool article spool. It will scan the
active file as well as all articles in the spool and report on the errors it encounters.
As this may take a while, using the -v switch is recommended to see how far the program
has progressed.

First, scanspool scans the active file, noting problems such as:

• malformed lines;

• newsgroups aliased to a non-existent newsgroup;

• newsgroups aliased to a newsgroup that is also aliased.

Then it will examine all articles under your news spool directory, complaining about
articles that:

• have a basename that starts with a leading 0;

• have a basename that is out of range according to the active file;

• do not contain a Newsgroups: header line;

• are all header and no text;

• are in a directory for which there is no newsgroup in the active file;

• are in a newsgroup to which they do not belong.

scanspool understands aliased newsgroups. Thus, if an article is posted to foo.old.name
that is aliased to foo.bar, it will be expected to be found under foo.bar and not
foo.old.name.

Articles posted to a newsgroup of status "j" or "x" (the fourth field of the active file)
will be expected to show up under the junk group.

scanspool assumes that the path of a valid newsgroup's directory from the root of the
spool tree will not contain any "." character. Thus, directories such as out.going,
tmp.dir, in.coming and news.archive will not be searched. This program also assumes that
article basenames contain only decimal digits. Last, files under the top level directory
lost+found are not scanned.

OPTIONS

       -a active-file
           The active file to use; pathdb/active is the default.

       -c  Only check article filenames.  scanspool will therefore not actually scan the
           Newsgroups: header field of the articles.

       -n  Don't throttle innd while scanning.

       -s spool-dir
           The root of the spool tree; patharticles is the default.

       -v  Setting this flag enables a verbose mode.  scanspool will then print which newsgroup
           is currently worked upon.  It will list all the articles found in non-active
           directories (that is to say articles sorted into groups no longer present in the
           active file), rather than just printing the group once.

DIAGNOSTICS

       The output of scanspool will start with one of the following forms:

       "FATAL:" (to stderr)
           Fatal or internal error.

       "WARN:" (to stderr)
           active or article format problem, newsgroup alias problem, find(1) error, article open
           error.

       "path/123:" (to stdout)
           Issues such as:

           •   basename starts with 0;

           •   article number out of range;

           •   article in the wrong directory;

           •   article in a directory not related to an active non-aliased newsgroup.

       "\t ..." (to stdout)
           Verbose messages start with a tab.

BUGS

       scanspool is unable to detect and properly deal with spool formats other than tradspool.
       However, if the files that store your articles are named other than just all-digits, they
       will simply be skipped (and your active is still checked).

       scanspool only considers the first line of the Newsgroups: header field.  Continuation
       lines are not taken into account.

HISTORY

       scanspool was written by Landon Curt Noll (chongo was here  /\../\).

       This manual page was written by Florian Schlichting, largely based on comments in the
       script.

       $Id: scanspool.pod 9302 2011-08-04 21:10:17Z iulius $