OVERCHAN(8)						      System Manager's Manual						       OVERCHAN(8)

NAME

       overchan - update the news overview database

SYNOPSIS

       overchan [ -D dir ] [ -c ] [ file...  ]

DESCRIPTION

       Overchan  reads	article  data  from files or standard input if none are specified.  (A single dash in the file list means to read standard
       input.)	It uses this information to update the news overview database.	Overchan is designed to be used by  InterNetNews  or  the  C  News
       ``mkov'' packages to update the database as the articles come in.  The database for each newsgroup is stored in a file named .overview in a
       newsgroup directory within the overview database tree.

       Overchan locks the database file (by locking an auxiliary file) before appending the new data.  To purge  data  after  articles	have  been
       expired, see expireover(8).

       By default, overchan processes its input as an INN overview stream written as a ``WO'' entry in the newsfeeds(5) file, for example:

	      overview:*:Tc,WO:/usr/lib/news/bin/overchan

       This  data  consists  of  a  line of text, separated into two parts by a tab.  The first part is a list of all relative pathnames where the
       article has been written, with a single space between entries.  The second part is the data to be written into the  overview  file,  except
       that  the  initial article number is omitted.  The data in the overview files should be expired by running expireover(8).  This is normally
       done by adding the ``expireover'' flag to the news.daily(8) invocation.

OPTIONS

       -c     To process the output of the mkov(8) program, use the ``-c'' flag.  This format is described in the ``nov'' distribution.

       -D     The ``-D'' flag can be used to specify where the databases are stored.  The default directory is /var/spool/news/over.view.

HISTORY

       Written by Rob Robertson <rob@violet.berkeley.edu> and Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net>  for  InterNetNews.   This  is  revision  1.9,  dated
       1996/10/29.

SEE ALSO

       expireover(8), news.daily(8), newsfeeds(5), newsoverview(5), newsoverview(8).

																       OVERCHAN(8)