OVERCHAN(8)OVERCHAN(8)NAMEoverchan - update the news overview database
SYNOPSISoverchan [ -D dir ] [ -c ] [ file... ]
DESCRIPTION
Overchan reads article data from files or standard input
if none are specified. (A single dash in the file list
means to read standard input.) It uses this information
to update the news overview database. Overchan is
designed to be used by InterNetNews or the C News ``mkov''
packages to update the database as the articles come in.
The database for each newsgroup is stored in a file named
<overviewname in inn.conf> in a newsgroup directory within
the overview database tree.
Overchan locks the database file (by locking an auxiliary
file) before appending the new data. To purge data after
articles have been expired, see expireover(8).
By default, overchan processes its input as an INN
overview stream written as a ``WO'' entry in the news-
feeds(5) file, for example:
overview!:*:Tc,WO:<PREFIX specified with --prefix
at configure>/bin/overchan
This data consists of a line of text, separated into two
parts by a tab. The first part is a list of all relative
pathnames where the article has been written, with a sin-
gle space between entries. The second part is the data to
be written into the overview file, except that the initial
article number is omitted. The data in the overview files
should be expired by running expireover(8). This is nor-
mally done by adding the ``expireover'' flag to the
news.daily(8) invocation.
If you are using the storage API (see the ``storageapi''
option in inn.conf(5) ), then use something like the fol-
lowing line in your newsfeeds(5) file:
overview!:*:Ao,Tc,WhR:<--prefix=PREFIX at config-
ure>/bin/overchan
This sends the Message-ID hash key, along with the repli-
cation information to overchan for storing in the format
used by nnrpd(8). This information is basically just a
combination of the Message-ID hash key and the article
number. See the overview.ctl(5) file for more information
on storing the overview data.
OPTIONS-c To process the output of the mkov(8) program, use
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OVERCHAN(8)OVERCHAN(8)
the ``-c'' flag. This format is described in the
``nov'' distribution.
-D The ``-D'' flag can be used to specify where the
databases are stored. The default directory is
<pathoverview in inn.conf>.
HISTORY
Written by Rob Robertson <rob@violet.berkeley.edu> and
Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews. This is
revision 1.1.2.1, dated 1999/06/12.
SEE ALSOexpireover(8), inn.conf(5), news.daily(8), newsfeeds(5).
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