Pnews - a program for posting news articles

Pnews newsgroup title

or

Pnews -h headerfile [oldarticle]

or

Pnews

Pnews is a friendly interface for posting news articles. It will ask several questions, then allow you to enter your article, and then post it using the inews(1) program. If you type h and a carriage return at any point, Pnews will tell you what it wants to know.

If you put a .signature file in your home directory, your inews program will usually append it to your message after you are done editing it. If you prefer to see your signature while you are editing, rename your .signature file to be .news_sig and it will be appended before you begin to edit. Note that .news_sig obeys the setting of DOTDIR, but .signature may not, since it is out of Pnews's control. If both .news_sig and .signature exist you'll get two signatures appended.

The -h form is used when invoked from trn or rn. If your editor can edit multiple files, and you want the article to which you are replying to show up as an alternate file, define the environment variable NEWSPOSTER as Pnews -h %h %A. You can also modify the the NEWSHEADER environment variable to change the header file that [t]rn passes to Pnews.

AUTHORCOPY

If defined, contains the name of a file to which the finished article will be appended. Default: article not saved

DOTDIR

Where to find your dot files, if they aren't in your home directory. This is primarily for accounts which are shared by more than one person. Default: $HOME

EDITOR

The editor you want to use, if VISUAL is undefined. Default: whatever your news administrator installed, usually vi.

HOME

Your home directory. Default: $LOGDIR

LOGDIR

Your home directory if HOME is undefined.

LOGNAME

Your login name, if USER is undefined. Default: value of whoami.

NAME

Your full name. Default: name from /etc/passwd, or ~/.fullname.

NEWSORG

Either the name of your organization, or the name of a file containing the name of your organization. (For use at organizations where the ORGANIZATION environmental variable is in use for other purposes). If both NEWSORG and ORGANIZATION are set, NEWSORG will override ORGANIZATION.

ORGANIZATION

Either the name of your organization, or the name of a file containing the name of your organization. Default: whatever your news administrator chose.

REPLYTO

The contents of a Reply-To: header line to insert into your message. Default: header line not inserted.

USER

Your login name. Default: $LOGNAME

VISUAL

The editor you want to use. Default: $EDITOR

$DOTDIR/.article

$DOTDIR/.news_sig

~/dead.article

trn(1), rn(1), Rnmail(1), inews(1)

Not the speediest program in the world, but maybe that's a blessing to the net.