NAME

postnews - simple interactive news-posting interface

SYNOPSIS

postnews [ -h headerfile ] [newsgroup]

DESCRIPTION

Postnews provides a simple interactive interface for posting news. It prompts the user for the newsgroup if it is not given as an argument (more than one group can be given, with groups separated by commas but no white space). Then it prompts for the article's subject. Then it drops the user into his choice of text editor (as indicated by the VISUAL and EDITOR environment variables) with a prototype article. When the editor terminates, it checks that the article has been edited reasonably, and then posts it.

If the article has not been written out from the editor, or if the editing instructions in the prototype do not appear to have been followed, postnews gives the user a choice between abandoning the posting or re-editing it.

The -h option specifies that a suitable header has already been constructed and can be found in headerfile, in which case postnews bypasses the initial prompting for header contents.

FILES

/var/lib/news/postdefltgroup default newsgroup (nonexistent means no default)
/var/lib/news/postdefltdist default distribution (nonexistent means `world')

HISTORY

Written at U of Toronto by Henry Spencer.

BUGS