NAME

postnews − submit news articles

SYNOPSIS

postnews [ article ]

DESCRIPTION

Postnews is a program that calls inews(8) to submit news articles to USENET. The commands should be self-explanatory, however you may type “?” to most prompts to get a list of the possible options (except for the “Keywords” of the article, etc). It will prompt the user for the title of the article (which should be a phrase suggesting the subject, so that persons reading the news can tell if they are interested in the article), for the newsgroup, and for the distribution.

The distribution is typically a geographic region or corporate region.  Typing “?” will get you a list of the possible distributions. You should use the minimum distribution that will serve your purpose for posting the article. For example, if you are selling your car in New Jersey, it is doubtful that someone in California (or Europe) would be willing to buy it. If you don’t restrict the distribution to your local area, you will cause this article to be transmitted unnecessarily around the world.  Currently, with a distribution of world, the article will be seen in the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan, Korea and other places.  A distribution header will, if given, be included in the headers of the article, affecting where the article is distributed. 

After entering the title, newsgroup, and distribution, the user will be placed in an editor.  If EDITOR is set in the environment, that editor will be used.  Otherwise, postnews defaults to vi(1).

An initial set of headers containing the subject and newsgroups will be placed in the editor, followed by a blank line.  The article should be appended to the buffer, after the blank line.  The initial headers can be changed, or additional headers added, while in the editor, if desired. 

After you have finished typing in your article, you have the option of sending it, listing it, quitting without sending it, editing the file again, or saving it in a file without sending it. 

For posting news from a program, see inews(8).

If the file /usr/lib/news/recording is present, it is taken as a list of “recordings” to be shown to users posting news.  (This is named after the recording you hear when you dial “information” in some parts of the U.S., asking you to stop and think if you really want do do this, but not actually preventing you.)  The recording file contains lines of the form:

newsgroup-specifier TAB filename

for example:

comp.allcomp.recording
local.all,!local.test local.recording

Any user posting an article to a newsgroup matching the pattern on the left will be shown the contents of the file on the right.  The file is found in the LIBDIR directory (often /usr/lib/news). The user is then told to hit DEL to abort or RETURN to proceed.  The intent of this feature is to help companies keep proprietary information from accidently leaking out. 

FILES

/usr/lib/news/active List of known newsgroups and highest local article numbers in each. 

/usr/lib/news/distributions Suggested distribution code names

/usr/lib/news/newsgroups Descriptons of newsgroups

SEE ALSO

inews(8), readnews(1), vi(1), news(5), expire(8)

Version B 2.11  —  Last change: October 22, 1986