crosspost - create the links for cross posted articles

crosspost [ -D dir ] [ -s ] [ file... ]

Crosspost reads group and article number data from files or standard input if none are specified. (A single dash in the file list means to read standard input.) It uses this information to create the hard, or symbolic, links for cross posted articles. Crosspost is designed to be used by InterNetNews to create the links as the articles come in. Normally innd creates the links but by having crosspost create the links innd spends less time waiting for disk IO. In this mode one would start innd(8) using the ``-L'' flag.

Crosspost expects input in the form: group.name/123 group2.name/456 group3.name/789 with one line per article. Any dots in the input are translated into "/" to translate the news group into a pathname. The first field is assumed to be the name of an existing copy of the article. Crosspost will attempt to link all the subsequent entries to the first using hard links if possible or symbolic links if that fails.

By default, crosspost processes its input as an INN channel feed written as a ``WR'' entry in the newsfeeds(5) file, for example: crosspost:*:Tc,Ap,WR:/usr/lib/news/bin/crosspost

To process the history file and re-create all the links for all articles use: awk <history -F' ' '(NF > 2){print $3}' | crosspost (where the -F is followed by a tab character.)

The ``-D'' flag can be used to specify where the article spool is stored. The default directory is /var/spool/news.

By default crosspost will fsync(2) each article after updating the links. The ``-s'' flag can be used to prevent this.

Written by Jerry Aguirre <jerry@ATC.Olivetti.Com>.

newsfeeds(5), innd(8).