NGLISTER(1)							  NGLister Manual						       NGLISTER(1)

NAME

       NGLister - Tool to download newsgroup information from news servers

SYNOPSIS

       nglister [ -u username ] [ -p password ] [ -P port ] hostname filename

       nglister -h | --help

DESCRIPTION

       NGLister is a tool to download information about groups and other information available on an NNTP (Usenet news) server.  It is designed to
       be fast and simple; just specify the server and the information you want, and NGLister will send it to standard output.

       You can write the information to a file by appending:

       > filename

       to the end of your command-line.

INSTALLATION

       To install NGLister, you will need a current version of Python <URL:http://www.python.org/>.  NGLister requires only  one  other  piece	of
       software: Optik.  You can find it at
	<URL:http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/optik/Optik-1.3.tar.gz>.

       To install, run this command as root: python setup.py install

OPTIONS

       -u username
	      Specifies the user name to use for logging into the server.  Use this only if your server requires authentication.

       -p password
	      Specifies the password to use for logging into the server.  Use this only if your server requires a password.

       -P port
	      Specifies the numeric port to use when connecting.  Most servers listen on port 119, the default NNTP port, so that value is used by
	      the default.  This option will only be needed rarely.

       hostname
	      Specifies the name of the NNTP server.

       filename
	      Specifies the name of the data to retrieve from the remote NNTP server.  Most people will use active or newsgroups here.	The set of
	      files  supported	varies	from one server to the next.  Please note that this parameter does not denote an output filename or even a
	      real filename; just the type of information you want from the server.  Here is  a  list  of  commonly-supported  information  types.
	      Additional items are specified in RFC2980 <URL:http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2980.txt> with the LIST command.

	      o active lists all newsgroups and describes their numbering.

	      o newsgroups lists the newsgroup descriptions.  Note that most servers do not carry descriptions for all groups, and the groups that
		lack a description will not be listed here at all.

	      o active.times describes how recently each newsgroup has seen activity.

	      o motd shows the server's "Message Of The Day" -- that is, current news about the server.

       -h

       --help Displays brief usage help.

CONFORMING TO

       o Network News Transport Protocol as specified in RFC 977

       o Common NNTP Extensions as specified in RFC 2980

       o Standard Python 2.2.1 as implemented on POSIX-compliant systems.

COPYRIGHT

       NGLister and this manual, are Copyright (C) 2003 John Goerzen.

       This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as  published	by
       the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

       This  program  is  distributed  in  the	hope  that  it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MER-
       CHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details.

       You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free  Software  Foundation,
       Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307 USA

AUTHOR

       NGLister its libraries, documentation, and all included files, was written by John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> and copyright is held as
       stated in the COPYRIGHT section.

       NGLister may be downloaded from the Subversion repository <URL:http://svn.complete.org/> or from the Debian package page  <URL:http://pack-
       ages.debian.org/unstable/news/nglister.html>.

SEE ALSO

       slrn(1), python(1)

John Goerzen							 12 February 2003						       NGLISTER(1)