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).