POSTNEWS(1)

NAME
postnews - submit news articles

SYNOPSIS
postnews [ article ]

DESCRIPTION

Postnews calls up the inews(1) utility to submit news articles to USENET. Postnews prompts you for the title of the article, for the newsgroup, and for the distribution. The title of the article should be a phrase suggesting the subject, so that persons reading the news can tell if they are interested in the article.

If you omit the name of the newsgroup (by typing a carriage-return when asked for the newsgroup), postnews posts the article to general.

general is read by everyone on the local machine. Other possible newsgroups include, but are not limited to, btl.general, read by all users at all Bell Labs sites on USENET, net.general, read by all users at all sites on USENET, and net.news, 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 list of newsgroup names, and defaults to the same as the newsgroup. If they are the same, the distribution is omitted from the headers put into the editor buffer. A distribution header is included in the headers of the article if given, affecting where the article is distributed to.

After entering the title, newsgroup, and distribution, postnews calls up an editor program where you can compose the article. Postnews uses vi(1) as the editor unless you have specified another editor via the $EDITOR environment variable, in which case postnews uses the editor specified there.

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 is read from the file specified by article.

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

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