statnews - generate some useful statistics out of a newsgroup

statnews [OPTIONS] NEWSGROUP

The statnews command get some useful statistics out of a newsgroup. It displays things like how many articles each author posted, how many characters was written, how many lines were quoted, how many articles belong to each thread, the number of messages/characters per day, the average message length, and so on.

--capitalize(*)

Whether to capitalize the name of both the sender and the receiver of each message (default is CW--capitalize: yes). This option is useful to collect CW"AUTHOR" together with CW"author", CW"Author", and CW"AuThor".

--dotted(*)

Whether to translate CW"." to CW"/" in NEWSGROUP (default is CW--nodotted: does translate). This option may be useful if your system stores each newsgroup in a dedicate directory (e.g., news.useless.group) instead that by hierarchy (e.g., news/useless/group), or if your system has a news archive stored this way.

--from=DATE

Set the date statistics start from (DATE format is CWdd/mm/yyyy, GMT).

--help

Display the help summary.

--spooldir=SPOOLDIR

Search NEWSGROUP in SPOOLDIR (default is /var/spool/news/articles/).

--to=DATE

Set the date statistics end by (DATE format is CWdd/mm/yyyy, GMT).

--width=WIDTH

Set the terminal width to WIDTH columns (default is 80, with a minimum of 70).

Options may be conveniently abbreviated and prefixed by - instead of --; the = may be omitted or substituted with one or more blanks.

Options listed with (*) may be negated by adding the prefix CW"no" in front of them (e.g., CW--dotted => CW--nodotted).

The statnews command returns 0 on success and a positive integer on errors.

The environment variable STATNEWS can hold a set of default options for statnews.

These options are interpreted first by the program and can be overridden by explicit command line parameters. For example:

sh:

CWSTATNEWS="--nocapital --width=132"; export STATNEWS

csh:

CWsetenv STATNEWS "--nocapital --width=132"

The default spool directory is /var/spool/news/articles/.

rn(1), readnews(1).

There are no know bugs.

This program is copylefted. Refer to the GNU General Public License for conditions of use.

This program has been written and is actively maintained by Davide Giovanni Maria Salvetti <salve@debian.org>.

This program was originally aimed for use with FidoNet style echo areas under Debian GNU/Linux. It can be succesfully used with Usenet newsgroups as well. More precisely, it can be used with every message base that stores each message in a file in some directory.