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).