NAME

inews − ‘user-friendly’ news-posting front-end for relaynews

SYNOPSIS

inews −p [ file ... ]
inews [ −h ] [ −x excluded-site ] [ −A ] [ −M ] [ −V ] [ −W ] [ −N ]
[ −a Approved:-contents ] [ −c Control:-contents ] [ −d Distribution:-contents ] [ −e Expires:-contents ] [ −f From:-contents ] [ −n Newsgroups:-contents ] [ −o Organization:-contents ] [ −r Reply-To:-contents ] [ −t Subject:-contents ] [ −C newsgroup ] [ −F References:-contents ] [ file ...  ]

DESCRIPTION

Inews injects an article into the news flow, installing it locally and broadcasting it (if appropriate) onto the network.  The article is read from files or standard input if none. Inews adds and alters headers, notably Message-ID:, From: and Path:, deletes invisible characters, and appends the first four lines of $HOME/.signature, if any, to the article, and then hands it to relaynews(8), provided the newsgroup(s) are unmoderated. If any of the groups are moderated, the article will instead be mailed to the moderator of one of the moderated newsgroups in the Newsgroups: header. 

inews -p files is exactly equivalent to invoking cat files | relaynews -r, where files may be an empty list; there is no automatic recovery of the input file(s) in case of errors, full disks or other problems.  Normal usage is inews -h, which assumes the presence of at least Subject: and Newsgroups: headers in the article.  −h tells inews that the article starts with headers; otherwise it starts with the article body.  −x prevents transmission to site excluded-site. −A waits until enough space becomes free in /var/spool/news.  −M does nothing, for B news compatibility.  −V causes relaynews to emit a log file line on stdout after processing is complete, by having relaynews not redirect stdout and stderr to /usr/public/lib/news/log and /usr/public/lib/news/errlog.  −W waits for relaynews to complete, instead of running it in the background and not waiting.  −N suppresses posting and produces on standard output the article that would have otherwise been posted; the resultant article will have been checked for illegalities as usual and will be suitable as input to relaynews(8).

The rest of the options are inherited from B news and exist only for backward-compatibility with news readers.  They should not be used by humans, as they are equivalent to adding the obvious headers, with two small twists: −f generates From: From:-contents which generates a Sender: user@host header if there is no Sender: header in the input, and −C tells you to use addgroup for local group creations and tells you what to feed to inews -h for global ones. 

FILES

/usr/public/lib/news/active
contains (un)moderated flag

/usr/public/lib/news/mailpaths
routes to moderators, Internet gateway

/usr/public/lib/news/mailname
the name of this cluster of machines for purposes of mail, including any domain

/usr/public/lib/news/server
the hostname of this cluster’s server

/usr/public/lib/news/whoami
the name of this cluster for purposes of news

/usr/public/lib/newsbin/inject/anne.jones
header censor

$HOME/.signature your name and network addresses (no line-printer graphics, please)

$HOME/dead.article saved article in case of errors or problems

/tmp/in∗ temporaries

SEE ALSO

mail(1), news(5), newsaux(8), relaynews(8)

DIAGNOSTICS

inews can take several seconds to run, so it almost immediately begins running in the background; error messages may appear somewhat later, perhaps in the midst of other activity. 

HISTORY

Written by Geoff Collyer at the University of Toronto as part of the C news project. 

BUGS

Inews should be unnecessary; its only useful function is adding Message-ID: headers and most novices use Pnews, which could invoke relaynews directly. 

Inews is an enormous shell script currently and can fail if any of the underlying Unix tools fail.  This typically happens with very long input lines.  Parts of inews are due to be replaced at the first available opportunity, so some of these problems may vanish in future. 

Amiga Unix  —  Last change: 17 July 1991