snget,sngetd - fetch news from upstream sites and store them
locally.
snget [options] [news.group...]
sngetd [options]
options: [-d] [-h Bps]
[-p nparallel] [-c depth]
[-m max]
snget fetches articles for the news.groups on the
command line (or all non-local newsgroups if none are specified) from their
respective upstream feeds, and stores them in the news spool /var/spool/sn.
If a newsgroup could not be fetched for, it may be attempted again.
sngetd does the same, except it reads newsgroup names from
/var/spool/sn/.fifo and does not exit. sngetd does not fork
into the background.
snget does not guarantee to fetch the groups in the order
specified on the command line. snget and sngetd will write
errors and status messages to descriptor 2.
snget and sngetd are both scheduling wrappers that
call /usr/sbin/SNHELLO, snfetch, and snstore. You must
own /var/spool/sn or be root in order to run snget and
sngetd.
- -d
- Enable verbosity, may be specified multiple times. This option is also
propagated to snfetch and snstore.
- -p nparallel
- Attempt to fetch for nparallel newsgroups at once. Default is 4,
maximum is 8.
- -h Bps
- Throttle the sum of bandwidth used by all snfetches to Bps
bytes per second. This option is used to prevent snget or
sngetd from hogging the network. By default there is no throttling.
- -c depth
- depth is passed to snfetch as the depth of the command
pipeline.
- -m max
- The very first time contacting the news server, retrieve no more than
max articles per newsgroup, default is 200. This option is useful
only if there are unprimed newsgroups and has no effect otherwise. The
.max file in each newsgroup directory still applies (see
snfetch(8)).
- -t timeout
- This option is not documented because it is ignored and will disappear in
a future release. See .timeout in FILES next.
- Server
Directories
- These are the directories /var/spool/sn/.outgoing/server.name:port,
which are symlinked from /var/spool/sn/news.group/.outgoing. If the
latter isn't a (symlink to a) directory, snget won't fetch for
news.group.
- /var/spool/sn/.outgoing/server.name:port/.timeout
- If this file exists and contains a number, this is taken to be the timeout
in seconds in all dealings with server.name:port. Default is 120
seconds.
- /var/spool/sn/.outgoing/server.name:port/.SNHELLO
- If this program file exists, it is invoked instead of the default (usually
/usr/sbin/SNHELLO) when an NNTP connection is first made to
server.name:port in order to read the greeting and upload posted
articles. If server.name:port requires a username and password, you
would copy the default here and edit that information in.
- /var/spool/sn/news.group/{.serial,.max}
- snget and sngetd read these files on behalf of
snfetch.
Other signals have default behaviour.
- SIGUSR1
- If -h Bps was specified, Bps is halved, else is
ignored.
- SIGUSR2
- If -h Bps was specified, Bps is doubled, else is
ignored.
See also /usr/sbin/SNHELLO for the list of environment
variables exported by snget/sngetd.
- SNROOT
- If this is set and is not empty, the value is used in place of
/var/spool/sn, the default news spool directory.
- PATH
- To find SNHELLO (if this server does not have a .SNHELLO),
snfetch, and snstore. If PATH does not contain
/usr/sbin as one of it's components, /usr/sbin is appended to it.