GET-NEWS(8)

💅 GET-NEWS ✨

okay bestie, welcome to get-news, section 8 of your System Manager's Manual — she's the Debian Suck front end and she's literally the main character of your news feed situation. 🫶

🎀 NAME 🎀

get-news — the Debian Suck front end. that's it, that's the name, no notes. 💖

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

get-news [ sitename ] [ -h ] [ -outgoingfile filename ] [ -userid userid
] [ -password password ] [ -noauth ] [ -port port ] [ -server sitename ]
[ -q ] [ -getonly ] [ -postonly ] [ -timestamp ] [ -verbose ]

🦋 the sitename argument 🦋

get-news needs to know which site to connect to, and that's what sitename is for. give her a name and she'll use it for multiple purposes, setting:

• the DNS name of the NNTP host that get-news connects to in order to download and upload articles 🌐
• the suffix for some of the configuration files get-news uses (sucknewsrc, active-ignore, suckkillfile) 📁
• the news feed name — the name of the file in /var/spool/news/outgoing that holds the list of the articles to be sent 📤

fr fr, here's the vibe: run the command get-news news.provider.site and the script goes and contacts news.provider.site, sends the messages listed in /var/spool/news/outgoing/news.provider.site (according to the feed of this name defined in /etc/news/newsfeeds), and uses /etc/suck/sucknewsrc.news.provider.site as its list of newsgroups, /etc/suck/suckkillfile.news.provider.site as its killfile, and — in case -A or -AL is specified in get-news.conf — suits the newsgroup list to /etc/suck/active-ignore.news.provider.site. iconique. 👑

and when the sitename parameter is missing (like when get-news is run with no parameters at all, no big deal), get-news pulls its parameters from get-news.conf (remoteserver to specify the host, outgoingfile to specify the feed) and uses the no-suffix configuration files (sucknewsrc, active-ignore, suckkillfile). 💫

✨ the options ✨

• -outgoingfile filename — tells get-news to use an alternate remote server outgoing articles filename, instead of the default, which is the remote server name. 📝
• -userid userid — nope, this one's shy, she's paired up below 👇
• -password password — these two options (yes, -userid and -password, they're a package deal 💞) let you specify a userid and password, in case your NNTP server is demanding like that.
• -noauth — tells get-news to not send the userid and password, even if they're sitting right there in /etc/suck/get-news.conf. like, we're not doing that today. 🙅
• -port port — lets you specify a port number, if your NNTP server is on a non standard one. 🔌
• -server sitename — tells get-news to use sitename as your local NNTP server, instead of the default, localhost. 🏠
• -q — be quiet. do not display the BPS and article count messages during download. and listen — multiple -q's makes get-news shut up 🤫
• -getonly — only get new news, don't post anything outgoing. take, don't give. 💅
• -postonly — only post outgoing news, don't get anything. give, don't take. 💅
• -timestamp — add timestamps to the get-news.log and verbose output. ⏰
• -verbose — give more messages about what get-news is doing. and if you specify it multiple times, debugging output is enabled. 🐛🔍

🌈 GET-NEWS.CONF 🌈

Suck looks for a file get-news.conf in /etc/suck to initialize some defaults and set some options that are not available on the command line. so yeah, that file is doing a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes. 📂💖

💜 SEE ALSO 💜

suck(1), testhost(1), rpost(1), lpost(1). go read those too, they're all part of the friend group 🫶

and that's the whole page, bestie!! 🎀 it's from the System Manager's Manual, section 8, and the footer is just literally GET-NEWS(8) — no date, no version, she's mysterious like that. 💀✨ periodt. 🌸🦋