NNCHECK(1)

πŸ’– NNCHECK(1) β€” the check-for-unread-articles girlies' edition πŸ’–

okay bestie, welcome to nncheck, section 1 of the manual, general commands division. she's little, she's mighty, and she will absolutely tell you if you have unread news. no cap. 🫢


✨ NAME ✨

nncheck β€” check for unread articles πŸ‘€


🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

nncheck [ -Q -r -t ]  [ -f format ]

yes that's the whole thing. she's compact, she's iconic. πŸ’…


πŸ’œ DESCRIPTION πŸ’œ

so like, nncheck will report if there are some articles on the system which you have not read. that's it. that's the job. 🌈

Without options, nncheck will simply print a message reporting the number of unread articles, with the following format:

There are 327 unread articles in 25 groups

and when there are no unread articles, the following message will be printed:

No News (is good news)

nncheck will exit with a value of 0 if there are unread articles, and 99 if there is no news (see the exception for the -r option.) ✨

⚠️ bestie, important heads-up: even though unread articles have been reported by nncheck, the actual number of unread articles may be much lower (or even zero) when nn is invoked to read the articles. why? because the calculation of the number of unread articles is only based on recorded article number intervals. invoking nn to read the articles may reveal that the articles have previously been read in another news group, have been expired, or are killed using the auto-kill facility. so like… she's estimating, not snooping. don't come for her. 😭

πŸŽ€ OPTIONS πŸŽ€

The following options are used to modify the amount and format of the output from nncheck:

  • -Q β€” Quiet operation. No output is produced, only the exit status indicate whether there is unread news. shhh. 🀫
  • -t β€” Print the name of each group with unread articles, and how many unread articles there are (not counting split digests!). πŸ“‹
  • -r β€” Output a single integer value specifying the number of unread articles, and exit with a 0 status (somebody told me this would be useful). πŸ’€ honestly? they were so right.
  • -f format β€” Output the number of unread articles using the specified format. The format is a text that may contain the following %-escapes:
    • %u β€” resulting output "uuu unread articles"
    • %g β€” resulting output "ggg groups"
    • %i β€” resulting output "is" if 1 unread article, else "are"
    • %U β€” resulting output "uuu"
    • %G β€” resulting output "ggg"

where uuu is the number of unread articles, and ggg is the number of groups with unread articles. 🌟

For example, the default output format is

"There %i %u in %g"

which I prefer to the following less perfect format:

"There are %U unread article(s) in %G group(s)"

like yes the second one is trying so hard but the first one ATE. periodt. πŸ”₯


πŸ¦‹ FILES πŸ¦‹

  • ~/.newsrc β€” The record of read articles πŸ“–
  • $db/MASTER β€” The database master index πŸ—‚οΈ

πŸ’« SEE ALSO πŸ’«

nn(1), nngoback(1), nngrab(1), nngrep(1), nnpost(1), nntidy(1), nnadmin(1M), nnusage(1M), nnmaster(1M)

the whole friend group!! go say hi to all of them 🫢✨


πŸ‘‘ AUTHOR πŸ‘‘

Kim F. Storm, Texas Instruments A/S, Denmark E-mail: storm@texas.dk


and that's the whole page, bestie!! this was the 4th Berkeley Distribution release, rocking Release 6.7.5 β€” so go forth, check your news, and remember: <rainbow>no news is good news</rainbow>. mwah!! πŸŽ€πŸ’–βœ¨πŸ¦‹πŸŒΈ

πŸ“¦ where this page comes from