NETNEWS(5) NETNEWS(5) NAME netnews - usenet news articles, utility files DESCRIPTION There are two formats of news articles: A and B. Format A is the only format that the older netnews(A) understands. Readnews and postnews(7) deal with both formats, but produce B by default. Format A looks like this: Aarticle-ID newsgroups path date title body of article Format B contains two extra pieces of information: receipt date and expiration date. A file in B format consists of a series of headers and then the body. A header is a line with a capital letter in the 1st column and a colon some- where on the line. Unrecognized header fields are ignored. News is stored in whichever format it was created. The fol- lowing fields are among those recognized: From: Newsgroups: Subject: Date: Date-Received: Expires: Reply-To: References: ID of article this is a follow-up to Control: Text of a control message Each line of the control file file line has four fields, separated by colons: system-name:subscriptions:flags:transmission command Only the system-name and subscriptions need to be present. The system name is the name of the system being sent to. The subscriptions are the newsgroups it gets. The `flags' are a set of letters describing how the article should be transmitted. The default is B. Valid flags include A, B, N (use ihave/sendme protocol), U (use `uux -c' and the name of the stored article in a `%s' string). NETNEWS(5) NETNEWS(5) The transmission command is executed by the shell with the article to be transmitted as the standard input. The default is uux - -z -r sysname!rnews. Somewhere in the control file, there must be a line for the host system. This line has no flags or transmission commands. A `#' as the first character in a line denotes a comment. FILES Arlington VA, 1983