statnews1

Usage

Overview

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.

Options

--capitalize(*)

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

--dotted(*)

Whether to translate "." to "/" in NEWSGROUP (default is "--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 "dd/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 "dd/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 "no" in front of them (e.g., "--dotted" => "--nodotted").

Return value

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

Environment

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:

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

csh:

"setenv STATNEWS "--nocapital --width=132""

Files

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

Unrestrictions

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