NNGRAB(1)

📦
version 6.7.5 · 2 versions
, in ubuntu stonking

✨ NNGRAB(1) — General Commands Manual ✨

okay bestie, pull up a chair because this one is a whole mood 💖 it's called nngrab, it lives in section 1 of the manual, and it's your lil news-retrieval-by-keyword gremlin for nn.

🌸 NAME 🌸

nngrab — news retrieval by keyword (nn) 🗞️✨

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

nngrab [ -c ] keyword

that's it. one optional flag. one keyword. iconic minimalism tbh 💅

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so here's the tea: nngrab goes and invokes nn on all USENET articles whose subject (or keyword) field(s) contain an instance of keyword. no cap.

it's literally just a fast equivalent for this:

nn -mxX -s/keyword all

like, same energy, but speedier 🏃‍♀️💨

for example,

nngrab tesla

will retrieve items concerning Nikola Tesla. (yes, that Nikola Tesla — the man was giving main character energy before it was even a thing ⚡👑)

keyword case is ignored unless -c is specified, and the keyword can be a regular expressions (escaped to avoid conflicts with the shell, bc the shell is dramatic like that 🙈). for example:

nngrab "n.*tesla"

and the range of search includes all newsgroups on the system, including ones which are unsubscribed. yes bestie, we're going everywhere 🌈

🍓 FILES 🍓

  • $db/subjects — subject database 💾

💜 SEE ALSO 💜

iykyk, go read those too 🫶

🔥 NOTES 🔥

nngrab can be much faster than the equivalent command shown above, if the tertiary news subject database generated by the nnspew(8) daemon exists. to enable the faster operation, nnspew must be executed regularly by cron. so like, set up your cron job, bestie, or you're getting the slow path 😭

nngrab uses egrep(1) to scan the subject database, so if you are not running fast egrep (GNU-style) this is all for naught. literally all for naught. the whole thing. 💀

⚠️ nngrab will use a subject database generated by nnspew independent of its age. thus, if you stop running nnspew, remember to remove the subjects file as well. don't leave stale data lying around, that's not the vibe 🙅‍♀️

💀 BUGS 💀

  • Under version 6.4 onwards, search of the "Keywords:" field is not supported.
  • Search on name is not possible either.

yeah. two whole features just… not there. we mourn 🥀

👑 AUTHOR 👑

James A. Woods, NASA Ames Research Center E-mail: jaw@ames.arc.nasa.gov

absolute legend fr fr 🚀

and that's the whole page, bestie!! this one's from the 4th Berkeley Distribution, Release 6.7.5 — go grab some news, stay hydrated, and don't forget your nnspew cron job 💖✨🎀🦋

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