NAME¶
rnews - Inject individual articles and UUCP batches into INN
SYNOPSIS¶
rnews [
-NUv] [
-h host] [
-P port]
[
-rS server] [
file]
DESCRIPTION¶
rnews injects either individual articles or UUCP-style article batches
into an INN server. It submits articles via IHAVE and is suitable for
injecting articles received from other sources; local postings should
generally use
inews(1) instead. It is also used to process spooled
messages created by, for example,
nnrpd while
innd is not
available.
The message is read from
file if given, or standard input if no file is
given. Articles are sent to the server given in the
-r or
-S
command line options if given, otherwise to the server set via
nnrpdposthost in
inn.conf, otherwise to the local server.
When sent over UUCP, Usenet articles are typically collected in a single batch
to reduce the UUCP overhead. Batches can also be compressed to reduce
communication time. If the input to
rnews does not begin with the
characters "#!", it is taken to be a single news article; otherwise,
the first line of the input is interpreted as a batch command.
If the batch command is:
#! rnews <number>
then the next <number> bytes (starting with the next line) are read as a
news article. After that article is processed, the next line is again treated
as a batch command.
If the command is:
#! cunbatch
then the rest of the input is fed to "gzip -d" to uncompress it, and
then the resulting uncompressed output is re-read as if it were the original
input to
rnews. A compressed batch should therefore start with this
line and contain a batch of articles separated by "#! rnews"
lines and then compressed with
compress(1). (Batches compressed with
gzip(1) should instead use "gunbatch" as the batch command;
INN just uses
gzip rather than
compress because it can handle
compress-style compression but is more widely available, due to old
patent issues, than
compress.)
Otherwise, if the command is any other word, then
rnews will try to
execute a program with that name, looking for it in the directory
pathbin/rnews.libexec. The rest of the batch will be fed to that
program's standard input, and the standard output from the program will be
treated as if it were the original input to
rnews. INN comes with three
such standard batch processors:
- bunbatch
- It invokes bzip2 and should be used for batches compressed with
bzip2.
- c7unbatch
- It undoes an ASCII encoding to recover the original binary compressed
stream and then decompresses it as explained above.
- gunbatch
- It invokes gzip and should be used for batches compressed with
gzip.
By default,
rnews will log and discard any articles that are rejected by
the server or cannot be parsed by
rnews for some reason (such as a
missing header). This default can be changed when compiling INN by setting
DO_RNEWS_SAVE_BAD in
include/inn/options.h. There is no way to change
it at runtime, unfortunately.
OPTIONS¶
- -h host
- If -h is given, rnews will log the message ID and
host via syslog for each article that it offers to the server. This
is used in conjunction with a UUCP feed to get a log of the messages
received via that feed. This will also be done if the environment variable
UU_MACHINE is set, but will only be done if host is not an empty
string. (You can therefore turn off logging even if UU_MACHINE will be set
by passing the flag "-h ''" to rnews.)
- -N
- Normally, if unpacking the input batch fails, it is re-spooled to
pathincoming for another attempt later. If the -N flag is
given, no such re-spooling is done and rnews will instead exit with
status 9 if unpacking fails.
- -P port
- Use port as the server port to connect to rather than
nnrpdpostport (as set in inn.conf). Note that this value is
only used if rnews does not connect to the local server (in other
words, when -r or -S is given or nnrpdposthost is
set).
- -r server, -S server
- -r and -S are synonymous. If either is given, articles will
be sent to server rather than using the local server, overriding
also the setting of nnrpdposthost in inn.conf.
- -U
- If the server is not available, both rnews and nnrpd will
spool posts to new files in the pathincoming directory (as
specified in inn.conf). When rnews is invoked with the
-U option, it scans that directory and processes all spooled
messages found there whose filenames do not begin with ".",
attempting to send them to the server again. It's a good idea to run this
periodically out of cron to pick up any articles spooled due to temporary
server unavailability.
BUGS¶
rnews cannot process articles that have embedded nul characters in them.
(Neither can the rest of INN at present.)
HISTORY¶
Written by Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews. Rewritten in
POD by Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>.
$Id: rnews.pod 8537 2009-06-28 08:48:31Z iulius $
SEE ALSO¶
bzip2(1),
compress(1),
gzip(1),
inn.conf(5),
innd(8),
nnrpd(8).