inews - Online in the Cloud

PROGRAM:

NAME

inews - Post a Usenet article to the local news server

SYNOPSIS

inews [-ADhNORSVW] [-acdeFfnortwx value] [-p port] [file]

DESCRIPTION

inews reads a Usenet news article, perhaps with headers, from file or standard input if no
file is given. It adds some headers and performs some consistency checks. If the article
does not meet those checks, the article is rejected. If it passes the checks, inews sends
the article to the local news server as specified in inn.conf.

By default, if a file named .signature exists in the home directory of the posting user,
it is appended to the post, preceded by a line that contains only "-- ". Signatures are
not allowed to be more than four lines long.

Cancel messages can only be posted with inews if the sender of the cancel message matches
the sender of the original message being cancelled. The same check is also applied to
Supersedes. Sender in this case means the contents of the Sender header if present,
otherwise the From header.

Control messages other than cancel messages are only allowed if inews is being run by the
news user or by a user in the news group and if the control message is recognized. If the
article contains a Distribution header with a distribution that matches one of the bad
distribution patterns in inn/options.h (anything containing a period by default), the
message will be rejected. The message will also be rejected if checkincludedtext is true
in inn.conf, it contains more quoted text than original text, and it is over 40 lines
long.

If not provided, the Path header of an article is constructed as follows: The basic Path
header will be "not-for-mail". If pathhost is specified in inn.conf, it will be added to
the beginning Path. Otherwise, if server is specified, the full domain of the local host
will be added to the beginning of the Path. Then, if -x was given, its value will be
added to the beginning of the Path.

If posting fails, a copy of the failed post will be saved in a file named dead.article in
the home directory of the user running inews. inews exits with a non-zero status if
posting failed or with a zero status if posting was successful.

OPTIONS

Most of the options to inews take a single value and set the corresponding header in the
message that is posted. If the value is more than one word or contains any shell
metacharacters, it must be quoted to protect it from the shell. Here are all the options
that set header fields and the corresponding header:

-a Approved
-c Control
-d Distribution
-e Expires
-F References
-f From
-n Newsgroups
-o Organization
-r Reply-To
-t Subject
-w Followup-To
-x Path prefix

The -x argument will be added to the beginning of the normal Path header; it will not
replace it.

-A, -V, -W
Accepted for compatibility with C News. These options have no affect.

-D, -N
Perform the consistency checks and add headers where appropriate, but then print the
article to standard output rather than sending it to the server. -N is accepted as as
synonym for compatibility with C News.

-h Normally, this flag should always be given. It indicates that the article consists of
headers, a blank line, and then the message body. If it is omitted, the input is
taken to be just the body of the message, and any desired headers have to be specified
with command-line options as described above.

-O By default, an Organization header will be added if none is present in the article.
To prevent adding the default (from organization in inn.conf), use this flag.

-p port
Connect to the specified port on the server rather than to the default (port 119).

-R Reject all control messages.

-S Do not attempt to append ~/.signature to the message, even if it exists.

NOTES

If the NNTP server requests authentication, inews will try to read passwd.nntp to get the
username and password to use and will therefore need read access to that file. This is
typically done by making that file group-readable and adding all users who should be able
to use inews to post to that server to the appropriate group.

inews used to do even more than it does now, and all of the remaining checks that are not
dependent on the user running inews should probably be removed in favor of letting the
news server handle them.

Since INN's inews uses inn.conf and some other corners of an INN installation, it's not
very appropriate as a general stand-alone inews program for general use on a system that's
not running a news server. Other, more suitable versions of inews are available as part
of various Unix news clients or by themselves.

HISTORY

Written by Rich $alz <[email protected]> for InterNetNews. Rewritten in POD by Russ
Allbery <[email protected]>.

$Id: inews.pod 9767 2014-12-07 21:13:43Z iulius $

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