SENDINPATHS(8)

💌 SENDINPATHS(8) — like, the InterNetNews Documentation era 💌

okay bestie, buckle up, because this one is a whole send-your-stats-to-the-people situation ✨

🦋 NAME 🦋

sendinpaths — sends out Usenet Path header field statistics via e-mail, no cap 💌

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

sendinpaths [-cdhn] [-k keep-days] [-r report-days] [address [address
...]]

🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

so basically, sendinpaths goes snooping through pathlog/path looking for ninpaths dump files 👀, finds the dump files that were generated in the past report-days days, and then makes sure they're valid by running ninpaths on each one individually and checking that the exit status is zero (zero = slay, anything else = we have a problem 💀). once they've all passed the vibe check, it hands them over to ninpaths to generate one cumulative report ✨.

by default, that report gets mailed to the e-mail addresses configured at the beginning of this script — and default-wise there's literally just one address set up: <top1000@anthologeek.net> — all so the TOP1000 project gets fed its useful statistics 🍓. more info on that over at <http://top1000.anthologeek.net/> if you're curious, iykyk.

when it's all done, sendinpaths deletes every dump file in pathlog/path that's older than keep-days days 🧹 (yes, gone gone).

and if you wanna know how to actually set up ninpaths in the first place, go read ninpaths(8) bestie 🫶

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✨ OPTIONS ✨ (the main character section, honestly)

• -c — when you use this flag, the report also gets e-mailed to the newsmaster's address set at configure time, in addition to the default submission addresses or whatever addresses you passed as command-line arguments 📬
• -d — turns on debug messages 🐛 (very useful, very "turn on the lights")
• -h — gives you usage information 🙈
• -k keep-days — after it's done processing dump files, sendinpaths removes the ones older than keep-days days. the default is "0", which literally means remove all the dump files 🔥

setting keep-days to some other value is lowkey useful for debugging purposes, because it lets you keep a few dump files around 🎀

• -n — don't e-mail the report; just print it to standard output instead 🖨️. and nope, it also won't delete the old dump files (so everything stays put)
• -r report-days — process the dump files generated during the last report-days days. the default is "32", meaning it processes all the dump files generated during the last 32 days (assuming, of course, that a previous run of sendinpaths hasn't already deleted them according to whatever you set with the -k flag 👀)
• address ... — e-mail the report to the address (or addresses) you mention here, instead of the default one 💖. you can use several addresses separated by whitespace (and honestly, sending the e-mail to your own address is super useful for debugging purposes, so you can check that everything works fine 😭). for instance, for two addresses:

sendinpaths pathsurvey@example.org top1000@anthologeek.net

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👑 HISTORY 👑

sendinpaths was originally written by Olaf Titz <olaf@bigred.inka.de> in shell 🐚. the version shipped with INN is a rewrite in Perl, based on Mohan Kokal's initial work, and improved by Julien Élie 💜

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

ninpaths(8).

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and that's the whole page, bestie 🫶 this cutie is from INN 2.7.4, dated 2025-03-29 — iconic, periodt 💅✨