sendbatch(8)

NAME
sendbatch - create news batches for other systems

SYNOPSIS
sendbatch [-c] [-z] [-p packer] [-d] [-s size] system_name ...

DESCRIPTION

The sendbatch program scans the directory /usr/spool/batch or /var/spool/news/.outgoing (depending on your setup) for a file named system_name , which contains the pathnames of the articles that have to be forwarded to the named system. It creates one or more batches of news articles, which are optionally run through the compress(1) program for network efficiency. Every finished batch is sent to a the program defined in the fourth field of the /usr/lib/news/sys or /conf/news/sys file, which defaults to the uux(1C) program of the UUCP system.

The system_name argument is the name of the system to which the news batches are to be sent. It needs to be present. If more than one is present, the above process will be repeated for all of the named systems.

To prevent this file from being corrupted while it is working, sendbatch renames it to system_name.work before using it. That allows the inews(8) program to create a new file, while sendbatch is processing the current one.

FLAGS

-c  Compress. This flag causes the created batch to be compressed by the system's compress(1) program. No flags are given; this means that the batch may be compressed with a compression ratio of 16 bits, which can be too much for some systems. Use -p comp13 (see below) in this case.

-z  Zip. The batch is compressed by the system's gzip(1) program. This creates much more efficient compressed batches. The header written at the start of the batch is still #!cunbatch , just as with the normal compress option. If the remote system has gzip installed as the system's uncompress program, then no additional software is required.

-p  Packer. This option allows you to specify which program should be used to compress the batches. A list of currently supported arguments to this flag follows, in the order argument - program - batch-header.

    compress        compress        #! cunbatch
    comp12          compress -b12   #! cunbatch
    comp13          compress -b13   #! cunbatch
    compgzip        gzip            #! cunbatch
    gzip            gzip            #! gzunbatch
    freeze          freeze          #! funbatch

    Not all news systems understand this. INN can be configured for it, and ofcourse the W-News unbatch supports it out-of-the-box.

-d  Debug. This turns on a lot of debugging output, only interesting for the maintainers of the W-News system.

-s  Size. This flag detemines what the maximum size of the resulting batch file will be. An estimate is made of how much the batch will shrink if compression is used; therefore the raw batch size can be two or three times bigger. The compressed batch will have a size near the specified size, but variations of 10-20 percent are not unusual. The default batch size is 50000 and is set by the macro BATCHLIM in the wnews source code file wnews.h.

MISC
When started, sendbatch creates a lock file LCK..sendbatch in either /usr/lib/news or /var/adm/news , to prevent multiple copies of sendbatch to be running at the same time.

FILES
/usr/spool/batch/*,
/usr/lib/news/sys
/conf/news/sys

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