NAME¶
inews - Post a Usenet article to the local news server
SYNOPSIS¶
inews [
-ADhNORSVW] [
-acdeFfnortwx value] [
-p
port] [
file]
DESCRIPTION¶
inews reads a Usenet news article, perhaps with headers, from
file
or standard input if no file is given. It adds some headers and performs some
consistency checks. If the article does not meet those checks, the article is
rejected. If it passes the checks,
inews sends the article to the local
news server as specified in
inn.conf.
By default, if a file named
.signature exists in the home directory of
the posting user, it is appended to the post, preceded by a line that contains
only "-- ". Signatures are not allowed to be more than four lines
long.
Cancel messages can only be posted with
inews if the sender of the cancel
message matches the sender of the original message being cancelled. The same
check is also applied to Supersedes. Sender in this case means the contents of
the Sender header if present, otherwise the From header.
Control messages other than cancel messages are only allowed if
inews is
being run by the news user or by a user in the news group and if the control
message is recognized. If the article contains a Distribution header with a
distribution that matches one of the bad distribution patterns in
inn/options.h (anything containing a period by default), the message
will be rejected. The message will also be rejected if
checkincludedtext is true in
inn.conf, it contains more quoted
text than original text, and it is over 40 lines long.
If not provided, the Path header of an article is constructed as follows: The
basic Path header will be "not-for-mail". If
pathhost is
specified in
inn.conf, it will be added to the beginning Path.
Otherwise, if
server is specified, the full domain of the local host
will be added to the beginning of the Path. Then, if
-x was given, its
value will be added to the beginning of the Path.
If posting fails, a copy of the failed post will be saved in a file named
dead.article in the home directory of the user running
inews.
inews exits with a non-zero status if posting failed or with a zero
status if posting was successful.
OPTIONS¶
Most of the options to
inews take a single value and set the
corresponding header in the message that is posted. If the value is more than
one word or contains any shell metacharacters, it must be quoted to protect it
from the shell. Here are all the options that set header fields and the
corresponding header:
-a Approved
-c Control
-d Distribution
-e Expires
-F References
-f From
-n Newsgroups
-o Organization
-r Reply-To
-t Subject
-w Followup-To
-x Path prefix
The
-x argument will be added to the beginning of the normal Path header;
it will not replace it.
- -A, -V, -W
- Accepted for compatibility with C News. These options have no affect.
- -D, -N
- Perform the consistency checks and add headers where appropriate, but then
print the article to standard output rather than sending it to the server.
-N is accepted as as synonym for compatibility with C News.
- -h
- Normally, this flag should always be given. It indicates that the article
consists of headers, a blank line, and then the message body. If it is
omitted, the input is taken to be just the body of the message, and any
desired headers have to be specified with command-line options as
described above.
- -O
- By default, an Organization header will be added if none is present in the
article. To prevent adding the default (from organization in
inn.conf), use this flag.
- -p port
- Connect to the specified port on the server rather than to the default
(port 119).
- -R
- Reject all control messages.
- -S
- Do not attempt to append ~/.signature to the message, even if it
exists.
NOTES¶
If the NNTP server requests authentication,
inews will try to read
passwd.nntp to get the username and password to use and will therefore
need read access to that file. This is typically done by making that file
group-readable and adding all users who should be able to use
inews to
post to that server to the appropriate group.
inews used to do even more than it does now, and all of the remaining
checks that are not dependent on the user running
inews should probably
be removed in favor of letting the news server handle them.
Since INN's
inews uses
inn.conf and some other corners of an INN
installation, it's not very appropriate as a general stand-alone
inews
program for general use on a system that's not running a news server. Other,
more suitable versions of
inews are available as part of various Unix
news clients or by themselves.
HISTORY¶
Written by Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews. Rewritten in
POD by Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>.
$Id: inews.pod 8941 2010-01-28 20:45:16Z iulius $
SEE ALSO¶
inn.conf(5),
passwd.nntp(5),
rnews(1).