NAME

       snsplit - split an article stream into individual articles

SYNOPSIS

       snsplit [-r] [field... -] prog...

DESCRIPTION

       snsplit  reads  an  article stream from descriptor 0 and splits it into separate articles,
       invoking prog...  on each, with the article avaiable on descriptor 0.  This is useful as a
       quick-and-dirty way of filtering an article stream.

       The  incoming  article stream is expected to be in wire format, with lines ending in CRLF,
       leading dots doubled, and delimited by a dot on a line by itself.

       The article presented to prog...  will have lines that end in a bare  newline,  will  have
       all  header  lines  unfolded,  leading  dots  will  be  unstuffed, and the article will be
       terminated by end-of-file.

ARGUMENTS

       prog...
              is the program (with arguments) to run on each article.  If prog...  exits with any
              kind of failure, snsplit aborts.

       field...-
              are  optional  header  field names.  If these are specified, the value of the first
              header field of that name will be exported into  the  environment.   This  field...
              list must be terminated by the hyphen.  See also ENVIRONMENT below.

OPTIONS

       -r     Expect input articles in rnews batch format instead.

ENVIRONMENT

       snsplit  sets  some  environment  variables.   If  the  environment already contains these
       variables, they will be overwritten.

       SEQUENCE
              If already set to a positive value, it is incremented for the first article.  If it
              isn't  set,  is set to one for the first article.  Thereafter it is incremented for
              each subsequent article.  The value is always a 6-digit number with leading zeroes,
              and it can roll over.

       BYTES  contains the size of the current article.

       HEAD_LINES
              The number of lines in the head of the article, excluding the blank separator line.

       BODY_LINES
              The number of lines in the body of the article, excluding the blank separator line.

       FLD_FIELD
              If  any  fields  are  specified  on the command line, where field is the name of an
              article header field, then FLD_FIELD will be set to the value of field, where FIELD
              is  the same as field but with lower case characters changed to upper case, and all
              hyphens  changed  to  underscores.   Confusing?   If  field  is  message-id,   then
              FLD_MESSAGE_ID  will  be  set  to  the  value  of the first Message-ID field in the
              current article, if there is one.

EXIT CODES

       snsplit exits 0 on success, 1 on usage error, 2 on system error, and 3 on  article  format
       error.  If prog...  exits with other than 0, snsplit will also exit that value.