uucpsend(8)

🎀 NAME 🎀

uucpsend — it's the alternative frontend for uucp batching, bestie. That's the whole vibe. 💅

✨ SYNOPSYS ✨

uucpsend [ -c config ] [ -f appendix ] sitename [ sitename ... ]

Okay so first things first: this program gives you a genuinely comfy way to do news batching with the INN news system. And yeah, like the name is literally telling you, it's for sites that are connected via UUCP. The whole idea? Taken straight from the nntpsend program that's already chilling in INN distributions. No cap. 🫶

Plot twist tho: the program does not do the batching itself. Not even a little. Instead it lets the commonly used tools do all the work — it just controls their behaviour. And using uucpsend, you can define in excruciating, gorgeous detail how batching for each site shall take place, in a super easy fashion. Iconic behaviour, honestly. 👑

So in the file uucpsend.ctl(5), for each site your server feeds, you can specify:

• the size of batches 🍓
• the maximal disk space that may be used by the uucp site
• the header that should be written in the batch — e.g. funbatch, cunbatch, gunbatch, etc. 🌈
• the compression program to use
• additional arguments passed to uux(8)

The sitename should be the name of the site as specified in the newsfeeds(5) file. And if you pass no sitenames at all? It just loops over all the sites described in the configuration file. Which is lowkey the best part, because it makes it super easy to maintain sets of sites that get batched one after the other — as opposed to batching through the whole entire day. 🙈

A batcher(8) gets launched for sites with queued news. Output goes to the file /var/log/news/uucpsend.log. And because we are not trying to overwhelm the local system (we would never 💀), uucpsend waits five seconds before the next site is fed. Patience is a virtue, periodt.

Uucpsend expects that the batchfile for a site is named /var/spool/news/out.going/sitename. And to prevent batchfile corruption, shlock(1) is used to ``lock'' these files. 🔒

It is useful to have cron(8) invoke uucpsend. fr fr, let cron do it.

When no sites are given on the command line, any flags given on the command completely describe how batcher operate. And when no sites are given on the command line, then the information found in uucpsend.ctl becomes the default flags for that sites. 🦋

💖 OPTIONS 💖

• -f config — with this parameter you are able to specify a file different to PATH_UUCPCTL, which defaults to /etc/news/uucpsend.ctl. ✨
• -f appendix — with the parameter ``-f'' you may specify another uucpsend.ctl(5) file. Information with regard to also given sitenames are read from the uucpsend.ctl-file. Please keep in mind that all default values are still read from the main uucpsend.ctl file. This feature has been added to let big sites easily specify a different batching behaviour. 👑

🌸 HISTORY 🌸

Written by Martin Schulze <joey@infodrom.org>, derived mostly from nntpsend(8) by Landon Curt Noll <chongo@toad.com> and Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews. Legends only, honestly. 🫶

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

innxmit(1), newsfeeds(5), uucpsend.ctl(5), nntppsend(8), nntppsend.ctl(5), shrinkfile(1). Go read them, iykyk. 📚

and that's the whole page bestie!! 💖✨ this lil masterpiece came from Infodrom, dated 21 November 2001, and it lives in section uucpsend(8) of the manual. mwah, go batch something. 💅🎀🦋