nntpid
nntpid
– retrieve a single article from a news server
nntpid [ -v ] [ -d ] article [ article... ]
nntpid [ -v ] [ -d ]
nntpid [ -v ] -a newsgroup-name
nntpid
makes a connection to a news server, retrieves one or more articles, and displays them.
You can specify the article you want by either:
By default, nntpid
will try to display the article using a pager (more
(1), unless you have specified an alternative in the environment variable PAGER
). This is partly for convenience, and partly a mild security measure: it gives you some protection against the news article potentially containing control sequences that cause unexpected behaviour in your terminal. If nntpid
detects that its standard output is not a terminal, however, it will bypass the pager and just write out the article directly.
There are a couple of alternative mode of operation. In one, enabled by the -a
option, nntpid
retrieves all available articles in the group and writes them to standard output in mbox
format. In the other, enabled with -b
, nntpid
simply prints the lowest and highest article numbers currently available in that group from the news server.
The location of the news server is obtained by reading the environment variable NNTPSERVER
, or failing that the file /etc/nntpserver
.
nntpid
will attempt to interpret its argument list as specifying a series of news articles, as follows:
nntpid
will strip them off if it sees them, and will not complain if it does not. If the angle brackets are present, anything outside them will also be discarded.
For example, the following invocations should all behave identically. (Single quotes are intended to represent POSIX shell quoting, not part of the command line as it reaches nntpid
.)
$ nntpid '<foo.bar@baz.quux>' misc.test 1234
$ nntpid 'foo.bar@baz.quux' misc.test:1234
$ nntpid 'wibble <foo.bar@baz.quux> blah' 'misc.test 1234'
If nntpid
is given no arguments at all, it will read from standard input. Every line it reads will be interpreted as described above, except that whitespace will also be trimmed from the start and end of the line first.
If you provide the -a
option (see below), none of the above applies. Instead, nntpid
will expect exactly one command-line argument, which it will treat as a newsgroup name.
-v
nntpid
will log its entire conversation with the news server on standard error.
-d
nntpid
will write the article straight to standard output without bothering to try using a pager.
-a
nntpid
will always write straight to standard output (so the -d
option is unnecessary).
-b
Currently, the only form of authentication supported by nntpid
is AUTHINFO GENERIC
, using the environment variable NNTPAUTH
. It will only attempt this if it receives a 480 response from the news server; if your news server never sends 480 then nntpid
will never even look at NNTPAUTH
.
nntpid
is free software, distributed under the MIT licence. Type nntpid --licence
to see the full licence text.