kent@sparky.IMD.Sterling.COM (Kent Landfield) (02/26/91)
Brad Templeton, rightly so, let me know that I had broken one of the prime
rules of the sources groups in my posting of rkive. All programs should
include, at the front of the posting, a blurb describing what the program
is and does as well as other relevant details. I knew this... :-) So to
correct my error....
--------
rkive - archive USENET source groups
rkive is used to archive USENET sources groups, as well as general newsgroups,
to an alternate location as specified in an rkive configuration file. Archives
can be maintained in different ways:
Archive-Name, Volume-Issue, Comp-Archives, Chronological,
Article-Number, Only-Archive-Name, and External-Command.
Archive-Name and Volume-Issue methods are for use in archiving the moderated
sources groups specificially. Comp-Archives is used to archive the newsgroup
comp.archives. Chronological and Article-Number can be used for general
newsgroups. The Only-Archive-Name: method of archiving works well for groups
such as alt.sources. It only archives files that have Archive-name: lines.
The External-Command allows rkive to use a script/program specified by the
archive administrator to do the actual storage of the packages (unshar in a
script, script to maintain periodic postings) while rkive writes the log and
index file entries, etc. There is an example of an External-Command script
included. update_netdocs maintains a set of periodic postings in a common
area for all to access. This is an example of a good usage of external command
archiving but it is only an example. If someone wants to do and contribute
a real implementation in perl I'll gladly include it in future releases.
By means of a configuration file, the archive administrator is able to control
how archiving is performed. The administrator can specify on a per newsgroup
basis:
o The type of the archiving, such as Volume-Issue
Archive-Name, Article Number archiving, etc,
o Where the newsgroup archive is to be stored on disk,
o The location of log file for the newsgroup,
o The format of the logfile records,
o The location of index file for the newsgroup,
o The format of the index file records,
o A list of users to be sent mail when an article is archived,
o The owner/group and modes of each archived member,
o The method for archiving patches, whether with the package or inline,
o An external program to deal with the located articles,
o Only archive articles whose header lines match a pattern,
o Whether the article is to be verified by some checksum mechanism,
o Whether the archived members should be compressed or not and
o Whether the news spool directory is local or accessed via NNTP.
rkive is normally started from cron on a daily basis. Archiving of newly
arrived software is only done once for each file. If rkive is started
daily, the posted sources are placed into the sources archive the first day
the software arrives on the machine. Other methods for using rkive is to
have it executed from the news sys file directly or have it use a batchfile
of articles that have arrived for the newsgroup that is being archived. It
can, of course, be executed from the command line. :-)
-----
article - print formatted news article header information
article allows the user to display information contained in news article
headers. This information includes the auxiliary headers added by the
moderators of the source newsgroups. article takes the names of article
files from standard input or as specified on the command line. The user
can select almost any information contained within a news article header
and can then specify the way in which the information should be displayed.
The format that the user specifies is much like that of a C printf statement.
article selects, formats, and prints its output under control of the format.
The format is a character string that contains two types of objects: plain
characters, which are copied directly to the output stream, and selection
specifications. Specifying a selection results in fetching the selected
items from the news article. This tool is extremely useful when dealing
with the news system in general as well as dealing with archives. article
knows about compression facilities and can deal directly with a compressed
set of archive files instead of having to "zcat filename | article".
-Kent+
--
Kent Landfield INTERNET: kent@sparky.IMD.Sterling.COM
Sterling Software, IMD UUCP: uunet!sparky!kent
Phone: (402) 291-8300 FAX: (402) 291-4362
Please send comp.sources.misc-related mail to kent@uunet.uu.net.