Tcl Library Source Code

Files in directory examples/nntp of check-in 7e8153135223d2c9

This directory contains examples making use of the nntp module
provided by tcllib.

The file 'nntp.examples' provides a number of very small examples on
how to use the nntp module.

Beyond that there is currently only one application is available,
'postnews'. This application is a drop-in replacement of the 'postit'
application which came with my [1] Debian/Linux system. I wrote it
because 'postit' was unable to post articles to the host 'news' aka
'shawnews', i.e. the NNTP system provided by my new ISP here in
Vancouver. I had no big desire to look into the C code of 'postit' to
find out why it was unable to post, wrote a hack version of 'postnews'
in 15 minutes and when that worked my desire to debug 'postit' went
below zero. Another half an hour was spent the next evening with
'postnews' to polish it and make it a nice example for 'tcllib'.

Synopsis:

	postit articlelist newsserver

articlelist is a file in <newspsool>/outgoing containing a list of all
articles to push to the newsserver. It contains one line per article
to push. Each line consists of two fields, the path to the file
containing the article itself and the message id of the article. The
fields are separated by whitespace. The aformentioned path is relative
to <newsspool>.

The knowledge that articlelist = <newspsool>/outgoing/<somefile> holds
is essential to allow 'postnews' to compute the location of the
<newsspool> without a third argument.

The application carefully checks that the articlelist exists, is a
file and is readable. It also checks each articlefile in the same
manner. Only articles which are not known to the server are
posted. This check uses the message id in the articlelist, i.e. it
does not have to read the articlefile to determine this information.


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[1] Andreas Kupries <[email protected]>