snsend - distribute articles
snstore - store articles locally
snsend [-rvcna]
snstore [-rvcna]
snsend reads articles from descriptor 0 and distributes
each one into each newsgroup they are posted to, like inews.
snstore does the same but stores them all locally. The input articles
are expected to be in wire format (lines end with CRLF, leading dots are
doubled, and articles are terminated with a lone dot).
Control messages are not treated specially.
The newsgroups list is taken from the X-sn-Newsgroups field
if it exists; otherwise it is taken from the Newsgroups field, which
must exist or the article will be junked. All fields whose names
begin with X-sn- (case insensitive) are always removed.
If Date or Message-ID are not present, these are
created. The local hosts name is prepended to the Path field.
If an article is to be junked, it is sent to the junk
newsgroup if it exists, otherwise it is discarded.
This applies only to snsend. snstore does not route;
it treats all news.groups as though they were local (see
Nonexistent newsgroup and Local newsgroup below). If any of
the following fails, snsend aborts:
For each news.group an article is (cross-) posted to,
snsend routes the article as follows, aborting if any action
fails:
- Nonexistent
newsgroup
- If /var/spool/sn/news.group is not a directory, snsend
ignores this news.group. If all news.groups are thus
ignored, the article is junked.
- Global
newsgroup
- If /var/spool/sn/news.group/.outgoing is a (symlink to a)
directory, snsend stores the article into a file in that directory,
if the same article does not already exist there (so news.group's
upstream feed doesn't get multiple copies of the same article.) Such
in-transit article files are given names that begin with a $ sign.
- Local processing via
script
- Otherwise if /var/spool/sn/news.group/.outgoing is a regular file,
it is taken to be a script or program and is run with the article
available on its input. See /var/spool/sn/dot-outgoing.ex.
- Local processing via
fifo
- Otherwise if /var/spool/sn/news.group/.outgoing is a fifo, the
article is written into it. It is an error if nothing is reading the fifo.
- Local
newsgroup
- Otherwise if /var/spool/sn/news.group/.outgoing does not exist, the
article is stored into news.group.
Options apply to snsend and snstore equally.
- -r
- The article stream is in rnews batch format, rather than wire format. Only
the #! rnews form is understood.
- -c
- If an article already exists in the local newsgroup it is destined for,
don't store it there. For snsend, this option has no effect on
newsgroups that are not local.
- -a
- (Aliases not allowed.) When storing to multiple local newsgroups, do not
alias subsequent copies to the first, instead, make a copy. Aliasing saves
disk space, but when the original expires, so do all aliases to it. This
option has no effect on newsgroups that are not local.
- -n
- Don't actually do anything with the article, just dump it back onto
descriptor 1.
- -v
- For each article stored in each newsgroup, output a line to descriptor 1
similar to what snscan would emit, except that for non-local
newsgroups the serial number will always be 0.
- /var/spool/sn/news.group.name/
- This includes /var/spool/sn/=junk newsgroup if it exists. Each such
directory represents the newsgroup of the same name, and articles are
stored in files 1, 2, 3, etc. beneath it. Each such
file contains 1 or more articles. This is contrary to the traditional form
of /var/spool/sn/news/group/name.
news.group.name.
- /var/spool/sn/news.group/.outgoing
- See also ROUTING above. The presence of this directory indicates
that news.group is global, and articles posted to news.group
end up here in files named $*. These files are linked in already
complete, so all such files are ready to be uploaded.
- /var/spool/sn/news.group/.compress
- If this file exists, articles stored in news.group are candidates
for compression. The content of the file is a number representing a
minimum article body size below which compression won't be applied. If the
file is empty this threshold defaults to 1024 bytes.
- /var/spool/sn/.me
- If this file exists, it's contents are taken to be the local hosts name
for purposes of the Path field. Otherwise the name is obtained from
gethostname(2).
See also /usr/sbin/dot-outgoing.ex for other variables
exported when snsend invokes a .outgoing program.
- SNROOT
- If this is set, its value is used in place of /var/spool/sn.
snsend and snstore exit 0 on success, 1 on usage
error, 2 on system error, 3 on article format error, and 9 if
/var/spool/sn/news.group/.outgoing (snsend only) exits with
other than 0.