checknews(1)

NAME
checknews - check if there is any pending news

SYNOPSIS
checknews [-nqvy] [ -N ng_list ]

DESCRIPTION

This little program checks the contents of the user's .newsrc file against the contents of the system's active file, to see if any new articles have arrived. Various flags can be presented to indicate how the presence or absence of new articles should be announced, if at all.

First of all, the -n flag can be used to only say something when there is No news , contrary to the default -y flag which instructs checknews to tell the user when there is news with a message like There is news. . The -v flag instructs checknews to not simply say whether there is news or not, but instead it will display the names of the news groups in which new articles have been posted. Finally, the -q flag turns off any output, and causes checknews to return 1 if there is no news, and 0 if new articles have been detected. This is mostly useful when called from the system's /etc/profile startup file.

If the optional -N ng_list parameter is omitted, all the news groups in the user's .newsrc file will be checked. Otherwise, only those groups in that file matching the list of news groups presented by ng_list will be searched for new articles. If the -v option is not specified, checknews will exit upon first match, to improve speed.

FILES
/usr/lib/news/active,
$HOME/.newsrc

AUTHORS
Fred N. van Kempen, waltje@Infomagic.COM
Miquel van Smoorenburg, <miquels@drinkel.ow.org>
Udo Munk, udo@umunk.GUN.de (Coherent)

SEE ALSO
W-NEWS Reference Manual