--- name: "peruser" section: "1x" platform: "linux" package: "peruser" version: "4b33-10" release: "Debian 3.0 (Woody)" platforms: ["linux"] url: "https://new.carta.tech/peruser" --- # peruser(1x) suite for offline reading and composing of Usenet articles ## NAME peruser - suite for offline reading and composing of Usenet articles ## SYNOPSIS **peruser**\ **npcollections**\ ## DESCRIPTION This manual page documents briefly **News Peruser** and it was written for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution because the original program does not have a manual page. Thus, the page is probably **out of date .** Instead, there is some documentation in the /usr/doc/peruser directory. **News Peruser** is a suite of seven small programs to enable a user to do offline reading and composition of Usenet news articles. Peruser can compose replies-by-mail, as well, and pass them off to a local sendmail. The toplevel applet's filename is "npcollections", but you are able to launch News Peruser by typing either that or "peruser" at the shell prompt. Or invoking it from your window manager's menu.\ News Peruser has been designed with the concept of header retrieval in mind. It is assumed that the user will wish to quickly download just the headers of the unseen articles from the newsgroups he or she is interested in, and then, perhaps while offline, peruse those headers, selecting those whose full article text is of interest. The user can then reconnect to the news server and transfer only the text of those particular messages, saving considerable time if he or she reads many newsgroups over a slow, dial-up network connection.\ All configuration of News Peruser is accomplished with the npconfig applet, which is launched by pressing the configure button of npcollections, although it can be launched from the command line. npconfig requires no arguments.\ Newsgroups are organized into trees in the main scrolled window widget of npcollections. The root node of each tree is the server" node, and its children are the "newsgroups." Folders, if any have been configured, are represented by trees also, below the actual newsgroup trees in the scrolled window.\ All actual news server nodes have four groups appended to their group trees automatically upon creation: the FOLLOW-UPS group, the POSTED group, the OUTBOX group, and the SENT-MAIL group. Original news articles created by News Peruser for a particular news server, sit in the FOLLOW-UPS group until the next time the group is "transferred," when Peruser will attempt to post the articles to the appropriate news server. Successfully posted articles are moved from the FOLLOW-UPS group to the POSTED group, where they sit until explicitly deleted. Outgoing mail messages generated by Peruser sit in the group's OUTBOX file until the next time the group is "transferred," when Peruser will attempt to pass the messages off to the sendmail program. Sent mail is moved from the OUTBOX group to the SENT-MAIL group, where it sits until explicitly deleted by the user. Each news server the user wishes to access, and the groups accessed through that particular server, are represented by a separate tree in the scrolled window.\ All message transfers are accomplished in the gui by the transfer button. Transferring" a group will cause different actions to be performed, depending upon the group's type. For newsgroups "transferring" the group will retrieve usenet articles or headers from their appropriate news servers, for FOLLOW-UPS groups "transferring" the group will post any articles in the group to the appropriate news server, and any outgoing mail messages will be passed off to the sendmail program. The appropriate action is performed automatically.\ The scope of the actions which the transfer, pack, expire, and search buttons launch, is limited by the currently-selected node in the main group tree. If a server node is selected, then only the newsgroups in that server's tree will be affected. If a single newsgroup is selected, then only that group will be affected. If no selection exists in the main group tree, all groups of all server nodes will be affected by the transfer, pack, expire, or search operation.\ To pack a newsgroup, means to remove all the seen articles from it. To expire a newsgroup, means to remove all articles having a Date header describing a time older than the configured expiry period. The only means to remove messages from newsgroups is by packing or expiring them. If you wish to keep particular messages, and remove others, you may mark those you wish to keep as unseen, and those you wish to remove as seen, and then pack the newsgroup, or you can copy the messages into a persistent folder, where it will remain until explicitly deleted.\ Folders, FOLLOW-UPS, POSTED, OUTBOX, and SENT-MAIL groups are not affected by packing or expiring. Messages linger in these groups until they are explicitly deleted or they are posted/mailed. All explicitly deleted messages are stored on disk by Peruser and can be undeleted or purged from storage with the undelete button on the npcollections window.\ In the thread tree of the npsummary applet, the presence or absence of two upper-case letters beside entries indicates whether the corresponding message contains a full article, or just the header (H = header), whether the header has had its full article text requested for future downloading (R = requested, instead of H), and whether the message has been seen or not (U = unseen). As well, An uppercase 'D' preceding a entry indicates it is a dummy node, inserted into the thread tree by the program to represent a missing precursor, or to act as a dummy root node for messages which have the same Subject header, but which reference messages not currently residing in the newsgroup's spool file. The fractions beside root nodes are similar to the statistics used in the News Peruser Collections applet to summarize newsgroups, only here, they represent the statistics for the articles in their respective thread subtrees. The fractions are of the form: unseen/total : requested/headers.\ The final release of News Peruser will recognize quoted-printable MIME Content-Transfer-Encodings of the iso8859-x character sets, and display them appropriately; however, no other MIME support is planned for the future. ## OPTIONS There are no command line options available. ## FILES - **~/.peruser4-config** user's personal information - **~/.peruser4-newsrc** user's NNTP server information - **~/.peruser\_spool/** user's news spool directory ## AUTHOR **News Peruser** was written by James Bailie \.\ This manual page was written by Josip Rodin \, for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others).