RNEWS(1)RNEWS(1)NAMErnews - receive news from a UUCP connection
SYNOPSISrnews [ -h host ] [ -v ] [ -U ] [ -S master ] [ input ]
DESCRIPTION
Rnews reads messages sent by a downstream UUCP newsfeed and sends them
to the local InterNetNews server. The message is read from the speci‐
fied input file, or standard input if no input is named.
If the ``-S'' flag is used, then rnews will connect to the specified
host. If the flag is not used, it will try to connect to the server by
opening a Unix-domain stream connection. If that fails, it will try to
open a TCP connection to the default remote server.
If the server is not available, the message is spooled into a new file
created in the /var/spool/news/spool/in.coming directory. The ``-U''
flag may be used to send all spooled messages to the server once it
becomes available again, and can be invoked regularly by cron(8).
When sent over UUCP, Usenet articles are typically joined in a single
batch to reduce the UUCP overhead. Batches can also be compressed, to
reduce the communication time. If a message does not start with a num‐
ber sign (``#'') and an exclamation point, then the entire input is
taken as a single news article. If it does start with with those two
characters, then the first line is read and interpreted as a batch com‐
mand.
If the command is ``#! rnews nnn'' where nnn is a number, then the next
nnn bytes (starting with the next line) are read as a news article.
If the command is ``#! cunbatch'' then the rest of input is fed to the
compress(1) program with the ``-d'' flag to uncompress it, and the out‐
put of this pipe is read as rnews's input. This is for historical com‐
patibility — there is no program named cunbatch. A compressed batch
will start with a ``#! cunbatch'' line, then contain a series of arti‐
cles separated by ``#! rnews nnn'' lines.
If the command is any other word, then rnews will try to execute a pro‐
gram with that name in the directory /usr/contrib/rnews. The batch
will be fed into the program's standard input, and the standard output
will be read back as input into rnews. If the ``-v'' flag is used, it
will print a notice of all such errors on the standard error, naming
the input file (if known) and printing the first few characters of the
input. Errors are always logged through syslog(3).
If the ``-h'' flag is given, or failing that, the enviroment variable
UU_MACHINE is set, then rnews will log the Message-ID, and host, for
each article offered to the server via syslog(3). Logging will only be
done if the value is not an empty string.
BUGS
Rnews cannot process articles that have embedded \0's in them.
HISTORY
Written by Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews. This is
revision 1.15, dated 1993/01/29.
SEE ALSOinnd(8).
RNEWS(1)