touch_newsgroup(1)

💖 touch_newsgroup(1) 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the touch_newsgroup manual page, from the General Commands Manual section, and lemme tell you this little script is a whole vibe. it's giving "quietly keeping your newsgroups alive" energy and honestly? iconic. 🧚

---

✨ NAME ✨

touch_newsgroup — force leafnode to keep reading low-traffic newsgroups, no cap 🌸

---

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

touch_newsgroup [-f groupsfile] [-h hostname] [-v] [newsgroups]

---

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so touch_newsgroup is a Perl script, right? and what it does is it goes and reads the last article in whatever newsgroups you specify, on the specified server, using NNTP. that's it. that's the whole job. 💅

and why, you ask? because it stops leafnode — or any similar news-server, fr — from marking those newsgroups as inactive just because literally nobody is reading them. like, bestie, they're not dead, they're just quiet. 🙈

heads up: you need Perl and the Net::NNTP module to use this program. on Debian systems, those live in the perl5 and libnet-perl packages. slay. ✨

---

🌈 OPTIONS 🌈

• -f groupsfile — read newsgroup names from groupsfile in addition to any you already put on the command line. and ooh, cute trick: use -f - to read from stdin instead. 🍓
• -h hostname — read the newsgroups on host hostname. the default is 127.0.0.1, so it just chills on localhost unless you say otherwise. 👑
• -v — be verbose! it prints the number of the article it reads from each newsgroup, so you can watch it do its thing in real time. main character behaviour, honestly. 🔥
• newsgroups — the names of the newsgroups to read. you can leave this out entirely if you specified a groupsfile. lowkey flexible of it. 💜

---

💜 ENVIRONMENT 💜

this one requires the Net::NNTP module — it's available in libnet from CPAN, or in the libnet-perl package. 🫶

and on Debian systems? bestie, it's set up to just run by default, daily, on the list of newsgroups specified in /etc/news/leafnode/touch_groups — but only if that file exists. if it's not there, nothing happens. not me checking that path twice. 😭

---

💀 LIMITATIONS 💀

ngl, it only caters for one news-server. exactly one. and the IP address of that server is hard-wired into the script as $nntp_host. so like, no switching it up on the fly. periodt. 💅

---

🌸 BUGS 🌸

dies if it encounters any problems. that's it. that's the whole bug note. dramatic much? 💀

---

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Copyright 1999 Jim Nicholson <j.nicholson@computer.org>

---

⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

• leafnode(8)

---

and that's the whole page, bestie!! 🎀 this one came from the General Commands Manual, dated 18 June 1999 — shoutout to the touch_newsgroup(1) era, truly a moment in history. go read some newsgroups, you absolute icon. 💖✨🦋