KNEWSD(1)

💌 KNEWSD — a tiny nntp demon

okay bestie, welcome to knewsd(1), a tiny nntp demon 🦋 (yes, "demon", that's literally what the page says, we respect the spelling). it's a General Commands Manual situation, 1996 vintage, and it is lowkey iconic.

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

knewsd [ options ]

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

Knewsd is meant to be used with knews(1) so you can read news — (in)directly — straight from the spool directory, or even from a mail folder hierarchy. it reads NNTP commands from standard input and writes replies to standard output. that's the whole vibe: you talk, it answers. 💅

here's every command it implements, no skips:

• ARTICLE [number]
• BODY [number]
• HEAD [number] — these three return the head and/or body of the current article or the specified one. Message-id lookups are not supported, so don't even try it, bestie.
• GROUP newsgroup — enters the given newsgroup. 🚪✨
• HELP — hands you a list of the implemented commands. self-care!
• LIST [active | newsgroups] — lists the active file or the newsgroups file.
• NEXT — moves the current article pointer along to the next article.
• POST — posts an article via the specified posting agent. if you haven't specified one, the reply is gonna be 440 Posting not implemented. 😭
• QUIT — makes knewsd exit. bye bestie 👋
• STAT number — sets the current article pointer.
• XOVER range — returns the overview data for the specified range of articles.

okay so about xover: Knewsd implements the xover command either by using the overview files if they're present, or by creating overview records on the fly, or a combination of both if the overview file is incomplete. and in that last case — the incomplete-overview-file case — if the -update flag is given, knewsd will update the overview files. 🔥

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

first things first: there is no need to spell out the entire option name. a unique prefix is enough, like -a for -active. so cute, so efficient. ✨

• -spool directory — this is the spool directory. it must be specified, either at compile time or at run time. no spool, no party.
• -active file — this is the active file containing the newsgroups and the high and low article counts. if you don't specify it, knews must be told not to try to read the active file.
• -newsgroups file — this is the newsgroups file containing the group descriptions. it's entirely optional, so do whatever feels right. 🫶
• -overview dir — use this if the overview files live in a different directory hierarchy than the spool directory. different house, same vibe.
• -update — if this is set, knewsd will (try to) update any incomplete overview files it encounters.

⚠️ not a good idea if you're reading a system wide spool directory. like, don't. seriously. 💀

• -postingagent agent — if this is set, the agent will be used to post articles. a possible agent is exec inews -h. this command is interpreted by the shell, and it is important that it is exec'ed, so that knewsd may kill it on a broken pipe to prevent posting of duplicate or truncated articles. Knewsd will warn about this on startup. 👑

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

this software is Copyright 1995, 1996 by Karl-Johan Johnsson. 💖

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

knews(1), inews(1)

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and that's the whole page, bestie — KNEWSD(1), General Commands Manual, dated 1996, brought to you from the source of the same name. mwah 💅✨