rnews(8)

NAME
rnews - relay incoming news

SYNOPSIS
rnews [-d] [-U] batch_file

DESCRIPTION

Rnews is the program that, when called by the uuxqt(1M) program of the UUCP system, moves incoming batches of news articles into a spool directory (usually /usr/spool/news/in.coming ) of the W-NEWS system for later processing by the unbatch(8) program. These batch files may be either single articles, batches of articles, or compressed batches of articles.

When operating in normal, the program expects its input data to be present in the file named by its argument. If no argument is presented, standard input will be used. This usually is how the UUCP system calls it.

If all is OK, rnews will create a spool file in the /usr/spool/news/.rnews directory, and copy its data to that file for later processing by the unbatch program.

The -d flag instructs rnews to display some debug output while running. It was primarily of use during program development.

If the -U option is present, rnews will only call the /usr/lib/news/unbatch program, which unpacks the files in the spool directory. If the -d flag was present, it will be propagated to the unbatch program. This is useful for the entry in /usr/lib/crontab (or /etc/crontab, or /conf/crontab) , since the rnews program is in /usr/bin. For calling the unbatch program itself, we must know where it lives...

Assuming that the UUCP system delivers incoming news batches every day, one could put a line in /usr/lib/crontab like:

30 7 * * * /bin/rnews -U

which would call this program at 07:30 AM every day in unbatch mode, to unbatch the news batches that came in that night. Note, that you must execute it at a time after polling your UUCP host !

FILES
/usr/spool/news/.rnews/*

AUTHORS
Fred N. van Kempen, waltje@Infomagic.COM
Udo Munk, udo@umunk.GUN.de (Coherent)