POSTNEWS(1)

NAME
postnews - submit news articles

SYNOPSIS
postnews [ article ]

DESCRIPTION
Postnews is a shell script that calls inews(1) to submit news articles to USENET. It will prompt the user for the title of the article (which should be a phrase suggesting the subject, so that persons reading the news can tell if they are interested in the article) for the newsgroup, and for the distribution.

An omitted newsgroup (from hitting return) will default to general.

general is read by everyone on the local machine. Other possible newsgroups include, but are not limited to, btl.general, which is read by all users at all Bell Labs sites on USENET, net.general, which is read by all users at all sites on USENET, and net.news, which is read by users interested in the network news on all sites. There is often a local set of newsgroups, such as ucb.all, that circulate within a local set of machines. (In this case, ucb newsgroups circulate among machines at the University of California at Berkeley.)

The distribution can be any valid newsgroup name list, and defaults to the same as the newsgroup. (If they are the same, the distribution will be omitted from the headers put into the editor buffer.) A distribution header will, if given, be included in the headers of the article, affecting where the article is distributed to.

After entering the title, newsgroup, and distribution, the user will be placed in an editor. If $EDITOR is set in the environment, that editor will be used. Otherwise, postnews defaults to vi(1).

An initial set of headers containing the subject and newsgroups will be placed in the editor, followed by a blank line. The article should be appended to the buffer, after the blank line. These headers can be changed, or additional headers added, while in the editor, if desired.

Optionally, the article will be read from the specified filename.

For more sophisticated uses, such as posting news from a program, see inews(1).

FILES

SEE ALSO
Mail(1), checknews(1), inews(1), mail(1), readnews(1).