INEWS(8) MAINTENANCE COMMANDS INEWS(8)
NAME
inews, rnews - submit news articles
SYNOPSIS
inews [ -h ] -t title -n newsgroups [ -e expiration date ] [
-f sender name ] [ -d distribution ] [ -F references ] [ -o
organization ] [ -M ] [ -S ] [ -a approvedby ] [ -r replyto
] [ -x dontsentto ] [ -c control-message ]
inews -p filename
inews -C newsgroup
rnews -U
DESCRIPTION
Inews submits news articles to the USENET news network. It
is a raw interface called by news-posting programs. You
should not use inews directly. Most people use postnews(1)
to post news articles. Ultimately, of course, postnews(1)
and other news-posting programs call inews to do the actual
submission.
The first form (no -p or -C options) is for submitting ordi-
nary articles. The body of the article will be read from
the standard input. A title ( Subject: field) must be
specified (there is no default).
If expire(8) is currently running or if SPOOLBATCH was
specified at compilation time, the articles may be spooled
to /usr/spool/news/.rnews for later processing. Running
rnews -U will unspool this articles. Rnews -U is run
automatically by expire when it is finished.
Each article is posted to one or more newsgroups. If the -n
flag is omitted, the list will default to something like
general. If you wish to submit an article to multiple news-
groups, the newsgroups must be separated by commas and/or
spaces.
The -e flag is used to override the default expiration date.
This is seldom used.
The -f flag specifies the article's sender. Without this
flag, the sender defaults to the user's name. If -f is
specified, the real sender's name will be included as a
``Sender:'' line to prevent forged articles.
The -d flag allows you to specify the maximum geographic
distribution of your article; for example, a distribution of
aus limits distribution to Australia, and a distribution of
nj limits distribution to New Jersey. There is no way to
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send a message from California for distribution only in New
Jersey-your machine must be in the distribution that you ask
for.
The -r flag allows you to specify the ``Reply-To:'' line in
the article header.
The -x flag says not to forward this article to the speci-
fied site despite what the /usr/lib/news/sys file says.
The -F flag is used to attach a list of related articles
that this message references; it creates the References:
field of the posted article.
The -o is used to override the default organization name.
The -M and -a flags are to be used only by the moderator of
a moderated newsgroup. The -M flag causes the From: and
Path: fields of the article to be set to correct values for
a moderated newsgroup. The -a flag is used to add an
Approved: line to the header. Note that if the -M flag is
used in conjuction with the -h flag (see below), the article
headers must not have a Path: field in them already.
The -h flag specifies that headers are present at the begin-
ning of the article, and these headers should be included
with the article header instead of as text. Everything
before the first blank line in the article is taken as a
header field, and everything after that blank line is taken
to be part of the body of the message. (This mechanism can
be used to edit headers and supply additional nondefault
headers, but not to specify certain information, such as the
sender and article ID, that inews itself generates.) Inews
will ignore nonstandard and misspelled header fields entered
with the -h option.
The -c flag is used to send a control message.
The -S flag is used to override the automatic spooling
option (if enabled). It shold never be specified directly.
(It is normally used by rnews -U.
When posting an article inews checks the environment for
certain information about the sender. If an environment
variable NAME is defined, inews uses its value as the full
name of the poster. If NAME is not defined, $HOME/.name is
checked and if it exists, its contents are used as the full
name. Otherwise, the system value (often in /etc/passwd) is
used. This is useful if the system value cannot be set, or
when more than one person uses the same login. If the
environment variable ORGANIZATION is defined, then inews
uses its value instead of the system default organization
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name. If its value begins with a /, then it is taken to be a
file name, and inews takes the name of the organization from
the contents of the file. This is useful when a person uses
a guest login and is not primarily associated with the
organization that owns the machine.
The second form ( inews -p ) is used for receiving articles
from other machines. If filename is given, the article will
be read from the file of that name; otherwise the article
will be read from the standard input. An expiration date
need not be present and a reception date, if present, will
be ignored.
When inews receives an article this way, it will check the
history file to make sure that the article is not already
present, and it will make certain consistency checks to make
sure that the newsgroup names are legal and that the sys
file permits the article to be installed on the local
machine. Once the article passes those checks, it is
installed in the appropriate directory on the local machine.
If the article fails those checks, it is installed in news-
group junk on the local machine. In any event, inews will
then transmit the article to all systems that match in the
sys file and are not mentioned in the Path: field of the
just-posted message. The details of this transmission are
determined by the contents of the sys file.
The third form ( inews -C ) is for creating new newsgroups.
The use of this feature is limited to certain users such as
the super-user or news administrator.
FILES
/usr/spool/news/.sys.nnn temporary articles
/usr/spool/news/.rnews spooled articles not yet processed
by rnews -U
/usr/spool/news/newsgroups/article_no.
Articles
/usr/lib/news/active List of known newsgroups and
highest local article numbers in
each.
/usr/lib/news/seq Sequence number of last article
/usr/lib/news/history List of all articles currently
stored on this machine.
/usr/lib/news/sys System subscription list
/usr/lib/news/distributions
Suggested distribution code names
SEE ALSO
Mail(1), binmail(1), mailx(1), checknews(1), msgs(1), post-
news(1), readnews(1), vnews(1), getdate(3), news(5),
newsrc(5), expire(8), recnews(8), sendnews(8), uurec(8)
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AUTHORS
Matt Glickman
Mark Horton
Stephen Daniel
Tom Truscott
Rick Adams
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