snsplit(8) [debian man page]
snsplit,v0.3.8(8) System Manager's Manual snsplit,v0.3.8(8) NAME
snsplit - split an article stream into individual articles SYNOPSIS
snsplit [-r] [field... -] prog... DESCRIPTION
snsplit reads an article stream from descriptor 0 and splits it into separate articles, invoking prog... on each, with the article ava- iable on descriptor 0. This is useful as a quick-and-dirty way of filtering an article stream. The incoming article stream is expected to be in wire format, with lines ending in CRLF, leading dots doubled, and delimited by a dot on a line by itself. The article presented to prog... will have lines that end in a bare newline, will have all header lines unfolded, leading dots will be unstuffed, and the article will be terminated by end-of-file. ARGUMENTS
prog... is the program (with arguments) to run on each article. If prog... exits with any kind of failure, snsplit aborts. field...- are optional header field names. If these are specified, the value of the first header field of that name will be exported into the environment. This field... list must be terminated by the hyphen. See also ENVIRONMENT below. OPTIONS
-r Expect input articles in rnews batch format instead. ENVIRONMENT
snsplit sets some environment variables. If the environment already contains these variables, they will be overwritten. SEQUENCE If already set to a positive value, it is incremented for the first article. If it isn't set, is set to one for the first article. Thereafter it is incremented for each subsequent article. The value is always a 6-digit number with leading zeroes, and it can roll over. BYTES contains the size of the current article. HEAD_LINES The number of lines in the head of the article, excluding the blank separator line. BODY_LINES The number of lines in the body of the article, excluding the blank separator line. FLD_FIELD If any fields are specified on the command line, where field is the name of an article header field, then FLD_FIELD will be set to the value of field, where FIELD is the same as field but with lower case characters changed to upper case, and all hyphens changed to underscores. Confusing? If field is message-id, then FLD_MESSAGE_ID will be set to the value of the first Message-ID field in the current article, if there is one. EXIT CODES
snsplit exits 0 on success, 1 on usage error, 2 on system error, and 3 on article format error. If prog... exits with other than 0, snsplit will also exit that value. N.B. Harold Tay snsplit,v0.3.8(8)
Check Out this Related Man Page
HISTORY(5) File Formats Manual HISTORY(5) NAME
history - record of current and recently expired Usenet articles DESCRIPTION
The file /var/lib/news/history keeps a record of all articles currently stored in the news system, as well as those that have been received but since expired. In a typical production environment, this file will be many megabytes. The file consists of text lines. Each line corresponds to one article. The file is normally kept sorted in the order in which articles are received, although this is not a requirement. Innd(8) appends a new line each time it files an article, and expire(8) builds a new version of the file by removing old articles and purging old entries. Each line consists of two or three fields separated by a tab, shown below as : <Message-ID> date <Message-ID> date files The Message-ID field is the value of the article's Message-ID header, including the angle brackets. The date field consists of three sub-fields separated by a tilde. All sub-fields are the text representation of the number of seconds since the epoch -- i.e., a time_t; see gettimeofday(2). The first sub-field is the article's arrival date. If copies of the article are still present then the second sub-field is either the value of the article's Expires header, or a hyphen if no expiration date was speci- fied. If an article has been expired then the second sub-field will be a hyphen. The third sub-field is the value of the article's Date header, recording when the article was posted. The files field is a set of entries separated by one or more spaces. Each entry consists of the name of the newsgroup, a slash, and the article number. This field is empty if the article has been expired. For example, an article cross-posted to comp.sources.unix and comp.sources.d that was posted on February 10, 1991 (and received three min- utes later), with an expiration date of May 5, 1991, could have a history line (broken into two lines for display) like the following: <312@litchi.foo.com> 666162000~673329600~666162180 comp.sources.unix/1104 comp.sources.d/7056 In addition to the text file, there is a dbz(3z) database associated with the file that uses the Message-ID field as a key to determine the offset in the text file where the associated line begins. For historical reasons, the key includes the trailing byte (which is not stored in the text file). HISTORY
Written by Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews. This is revision 1.12, dated 1996/09/06. SEE ALSO
dbz(3z), expire(8), innd(8), news-recovery(8). HISTORY(5)