4.3BSD/usr/contrib/news/man/inews.1

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.TH INEWS 1 "February 2, 1986"
.ds ]W  Version B 2.10.3
.SH NAME
inews \- submit news articles
.SH SYNOPSIS
.BR inews " [ " \-h " ]"
.BI \-t " title " \-n " newsgroups"
[
.BI \-e " expiration date"
] [
.BI \-f " sender name"
] [
.BI \-d " distribution"
] [
.BI \-F " references"
] [
.BI \-o " organization"
] [
.BI \-M
] [
.BI \-a " approvedby"
]
.PP
.BI "inews \-p " filename
.PP
.BI "inews \-C " newsgroup
.SH DESCRIPTION
.I Inews
submits news articles to the USENET news network.
It is a raw interface called by news-posting programs.
You should not use
.I inews
directly. Most people use
.IR postnews (1)
to post news articles. Ultimately, of course,
.IR postnews (1)
and other news-posting programs call inews to do the actual submission.
.PP
The first form (no
.BI \-p
or
.BI \-C
options) is for submitting ordinary articles.
The body of the article will be read from the standard input.  A
.I title
(
.Ch Subject:
field)
must be specified (there is no default).
Each article is posted to one or more newsgroups.
.B \-n
flag is omitted, the list
will default to something like
.BR general .
If you wish to submit an article to multiple newsgroups, the
.I newsgroups
must be separated by commas and/or spaces.
.PP
The
.B \-e
flag is used to override the default expiration date. This is seldom
used.
.PP
The
.B \-f
flag specifies the article's sender.  Without this flag, the sender
defaults to the user's name.
If
.B \-f
is specified, the real sender's name will be included as a ``Sender:'' line
to prevent forged articles.
.PP
The
.B \-d
flag allows you to specify the maximum geographic distribution of your
article; for example, a distribution of
.Ch aus
limits distribution to Australia, and a distribution of
.Ch nj
limits distribution to New Jersey. There is no way to send a message from
California for distribution only in New Jersey\(emyour machine must be in the
distribution that you ask for.
.PP
The
.B \-F
flags is used to attach a list of related articles that this
message references; it creates the
.Ch In-reply-to:
field of the posted article.
.PP
The
.B \-o
is used to override the default organization name.
.PP
The
.B \-M
and
.B \-a
flags are to be used only by the moderator of a moderated newsgroup. The
.B \-M
flag causes the
.Ch From:
and
.Ch Path:
fields of the article to be set to correct values for a moderated newsgroup.
The
.B \-a
flag is used to add an
.Ch Approved:
line to the header. Note that if the
.B \-M
flag is used in conjuction with the
.B \-h
flag (see below), the article headers must not have a
.Ch Path:
field in them already.
.PP
The
.B \-h
flag specifies that headers are present at the beginning of the
article, and these headers should be included with the article
header instead of as text. Everything before the first blank line in the
article is taken as a header field, and everything after that blank line is
taken to be part of the body of the message.
(This mechanism can be used to edit headers and supply additional
nondefault headers, but not to specify certain information,
such as the sender and article ID, that
.I inews
itself generates.)
.I Inews
will ignore nonstandard and misspelled header fields entered with the \-h
option.
.LP
When posting an article
.I inews
checks the environment for certain information about the sender. If
an environment variable
.B NAME
is defined,
.I inews
uses its value as the full name of the poster. If
.B NAME
is not defined,
.I inews
checks
\kx\f2$HOME\fP\h'|\nxu+2u'\f2$HOME/.name\fP
is checked and if it exists, its contents are used as the full name.
Otherwise, the system value (often in
.IR /etc/passwd )
is used.
This is useful if the system value cannot be set, or when
more than one person uses the same login.
If the environment variable
.B ORGANIZATION
is defined, then
.I inews
uses its value instead of the system
default organization name. If its value begins with a
.Ch / ,
then it is taken to be a file name, and
.I inews
takes the name of the organization from the contents of the file.
This is useful when a person uses a guest login and is
not primarily associated with the organization that owns the machine.
.LP
The second form (
.BI "inews \-p"
) is used for receiving articles from other machines. If
.I filename
is given, the article will be read from the file of that name; otherwise
the article will be read from the standard input.  An expiration date
need not be present and a reception date, if present, will be ignored.
.LP
When
.I inews
receives an article this way, it will check the history file to make sure
that the article is not already present, and it will make certain consistency
checks to make sure that the newsgroup names are legal and that the sys file
permits the article to be installed on the local machine. Once the article
passes those checks, it is installed in the appropriate directory on the
local machine. If the article fails those checks, it is installed in
newsgroup
.Ch junk
on the local machine. In any event,
.I inews
will then transmit the article to all systems that match in the sys file
and are not mentioned in the
.Ch Path:
field of the just-posted message. The details of this transmission are
determined by the contents of the sys file.
.LP
The third form (
.IB "inews \-C"
) is for creating new newsgroups. The use of this feature is
limited to certain users such as the super-user or news administrator.
Please note that
.I "inews \-C"
creates a newsgroup \fIon all machines that the message reaches\fR, and not
just the local machine. If you accidentally create a newsgroup with
.I "inews \-C,"
without specifying a distribution, it will be created worldwide. If you want
to create a newsgroup locally on your machine, it is safer to edit the active
file by hand.
.LP
If the file
.I /usr/lib/news/recording
is present, it is taken as a list of
\&\*(Lqrecordings\*(Rq to be shown to users posting news.
(This is named after the recording you hear when you dial
.Ch information
in some parts of the U.S., asking you to stop and think if you really want do
do this, but not actually preventing you.)
The recording file contains lines of the form:
.PP
	newsgroup-specifier \fB\s-2TAB\s0\fP filename
.PP
for example:
.PP
	net.all	net.recording
.br
	local.all,!local.test local.recording
.PP
Any user posting an article to a newsgroup matching the pattern on
the left will be shown the contents of the file on the right.
The file is found in the
.B LIB
directory (often
.IR /usr/lib/news ).
The user is then told to hit \s-2DEL\s0 to abort or \s-2RETURN\s0 to proceed.
The intent of this feature is to help companies keep proprietary
information from accidently leaking out.
.SH FILES
.PD 0
.TP 25
/usr/spool/news/.sys.nnn
temporary articles
.TP 25
.RI /usr/spool/news/ newsgroups / article_no.
Articles
.TP 25
/usr/lib/news/active
List of known newsgroups and highest local article numbers in each.
.TP 25
/usr/lib/news/seq
Sequence number of last article
.TP 25
/usr/lib/news/history
List of all articles currently stored on this machine.
.TP 25
/usr/lib/news/sys
System subscription list
.TP 25
/usr/lib/news/distributions
Suggested distribution code names
.PD
.SH "SEE ALSO"
Mail(1),
binmail(1),
mailx(1),
checknews(1),
msgs(1),
postnews(1),
readnews(1),
vnews(1),
getdate(3),
news(5),
newsrc(5),
expire(8),
recnews(8),
sendnews(8),
uurec(8)
.SH AUTHORS
Matt Glickman
.br
Mark Horton
.br
Stephen Daniel
.br
Tom Truscott
.br
Rick Adams