OVERCHAN(8)

💅 OVERCHAN(8) 💅

okay so first of all, hi, welcome to the overchan corner of the InterNetNews Documentation — yes this is section 8 of the manual, the big scary sysadmin section, but honestly? it's not that deep. this page is gonna walk you through batch-loading your overview database and we're gonna have a good time doing it. 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

overchan — batch update the INN overview database. that's it. that's the whole vibe. 👑

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

overchan [file ...]

literally just the command and then zero or more files. we love a minimalist era.

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🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

so here's the tea ☕ — overchan reads overview data from the files you name, or from standard input if you don't name any files at all, and then it writes all that data into the INN overview database. and yes bestie, the file - also means "read from standard input", so you can flex that if you want. 💅

normally, overview data gets stored by innd for articles as they're accepted — that's the default behavior, no notes. but for performance reasons, it's sometimes useful to have the overview data written by a separate process instead. main character energy for real. to do that, you set useoverchan to true in inn.conf to tell innd to not write overview data directly, and then you add an overchan channel in newsfeeds:

overview!:*:Tc,WnteO:<pathbin>/overchan

where <pathbin> is pathbin in inn.conf. (yes, same name, it's giving recursion but it's fine, it's a config variable, breathe. 🧚)

and bonus: overchan can also be used to bulk-load overview data from appropriately formatted batch files — like overflow files from an overchan channel. so it's not just a one-trick pony, she contains multitudes. ✨

each line of input should have the following format:

<token> <arrived> <expires> <data>

okay so let's break down the cast of characters: 🌈

• <token> — the storage API token of the article in textual form, surrounded by @ characters. don't forget the at-signs, they're part of the look.
• <arrived> — the arrival timestamp of the article in seconds since epoch.
• <expires> — the expiration time of the article in seconds since epoch, or 0 if there is none.
• <data> — the tab-separated overview data.

and the rule, the one we do not break: each of these fields must be separated by a single space. not two. not a tab. a single space. respect the formatting, it's a whole aesthetic. 😭

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🦋 HISTORY 🦋

written by Rob Robertson <rob@violet.berkeley.edu> and Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews. man page rewritten in POD by Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org>. legends, all of them. 👑✨

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🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

• inn.conf(5)
• innd(8)
• newsfeeds(5)

go read those, iykyk. 🍓

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that's the whole page bestie, you ate. 💖 this little icon is from INN 2.7.4, dated 2022-07-10 — so if you're citing it in a group chat, that's your receipt. periodt. 💅🎀