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NETNEWS(5) File Formats Manual NETNEWS(5) NAME netnews - usenet news articles, utility files DESCRIPTION There are two formats of news articles: A and B. Format A is the only format that the older netnews(A) understands. Readnews and postnews(7) deal with both formats, but produce B by default. Format A looks like this: Aarticle-ID newsgroups path date title body of article Format B contains two extra pieces of information: receipt date and expiration date. A file in B format consists of a series of headers and then the body. A header is a line with a capital letter in the 1st column and a colon somewhere on the line. Unrecognized header fields are ignored. News is stored in whichever format it was created. The following fields are among those recognized: From: Newsgroups: Subject: Date: Date-Received: Expires: Reply-To: References: ID of article this is a follow-up to Control: Text of a control message Each line of the control file file line has four fields, separated by colons: system-name:subscriptions:flags:transmission command Only the system-name and subscriptions need to be present. The system name is the name of the system being sent to. The subscrip- tions are the newsgroups it gets. The are a set of letters describing how the article should be transmitted. The default is B. Valid flags include A, B, N (use ihave/sendme protocol), U (use and the name of the stored article in a string). The transmission command is executed by the shell with the article to be transmitted as the standard input. The default is uux - -z -r sys- name!rnews. Somewhere in the control file, there must be a line for the host sys- tem. This line has no flags or transmission commands. A as the first character in a line denotes a comment. FILES SEE ALSO postnews(7), readnews(7) M. Horton, Standard for the Interchange of USENET Messages, RFC850, DARPA Information Processing Techniques Office, Arling- ton VA, 1983 NETNEWS(5)