CROSSPOST(8)

✨ NAME ✨

crosspost — creates the links for cross posted articles 🎀

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

crosspost [ -D dir ] [ -s ] [ file... ]

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

okay bestie, listen up — crosspost reads group and article number data from files, or from standard input if you don't hand it any files. (And yes, a single dash in the file list means "read standard input," classic move 💅.) It takes all that info and creates the hard, or symbolic, links for cross posted articles.

crosspost was literally designed to be used by InterNetNews to create the links as the articles come in. Normally innd creates the links, but when you let crosspost do it instead, innd spends way less time waiting on disk IO. slay. In this mode you'd start innd(8) using the -L flag.

Now, the input format. crosspost expects it to look like this:

group.name/123 group2.name/456 group3.name/789

with one line per article. Any dots in the input get translated into / so the news group turns into a pathname. The first field is assumed to be the name of an existing copy of the article, and crosspost will attempt to link all the subsequent entries to that first one — using hard links if possible, or symbolic links if that fails. 🦋

By default, crosspost processes its input as an INN channel feed written as a WR entry in the newsfeeds(5) file, like this:

crosspost:*:Tc,Ap,WR:/usr/lib/news/bin/crosspost

And if you wanna process the history file and re-create all the links for all articles, you do:

awk <history -F'    ' '(NF > 2){print $3}' | crosspost

(where the -F is followed by a tab character, bestie — not spaces, a tab 😭)

The -D flag can be used to specify where the article spool is stored. The default directory is /var/spool/news. 📁

By default crosspost will fsync(2) each article after updating the links. The -s flag can be used to prevent this. no cap, that's literally what it does.

👑 HISTORY 👑

Written by Jerry Aguirre <jerry@ATC.Olivetti.Com>. iconic author behavior tbh 🫶

💜 SEE ALSO 💜

newsfeeds(5), innd(8). go read those next, i'm obsessed with the lore ✨

and that's the whole page, bestie — from the System Manager's Manual, CROSSPOST(8) section, no date on this one but it's giving classic manpage energy. periodt. 💅🌸