report - report news problems and status

... | b/report [ -u ] subject

Report is used to report the problems and status of the news system, normally by mail. The subject is a single argument (normally enclosed in quotes) summarizing what the message is about; the message text itself is supplied to report on standard input. If the message text is empty, report does not send anything.

The -u option indicates that the message is urgent, which may affect how it is mailed or to whom.

Report consults a control file, c/report.ctl, to determine the destination(s) of mail. The control file is syntactically a shell file, which should assign to the shell variables urgentto and nonurgentto. The values should be one or more mailing addresses, in whatever form the local mailer wants, separated by commas (and possibly white space as well). They should not contain material other than addresses, e.g. RFC822 comments containing full names etc.

Report is supplied as a central handling facility for error messages and status reports for C News, so that changes and customization in this often-system-specific area can be done in a single program.

c/report.ctl

mail(1)

Written by Henry Spencer for the C News project.

There is too much stupid and unnecessary diversity among mailer user interfaces for a single implementation of report to be entirely satisfactory. In particular, the incantation to send a message which is already equipped with some of its RFC822 headers is very system-specific.

The don't-send-empty-messages business is perhaps inelegant, but it turns out to be very convenient.