README for 'rebatch' version 1.0
(12th February 1995)

No responsibility is taken by the author for the consequences of using this software. All trademarks are acknowledged.

Comments, complains, suggestions, bug fixes can be made to the author:

Russell Street (r.street@auckland.ac.nz)

Contents


Introduction

rebatch is a script that cleans up after nntplink. When nntplink is run in 'stdin' mode as a channel feed from InterNetNews (INN), it can leave batch files of articles it was unable to send in the out.going directory.

A program external to nntplink needs to clean these files up. nntplink comes with such a program, called links but the I was unhappy with it.

rebatch is designed to be run from a crontab and will collect into a single batch file all of the files nntplink will leave behind. The companion script where.to will tell you how many articles in the rebatch batch files, how many have been transmitted and the estimated time to completion based on the average transmission rate.

See the file INSTALLATION for details of how to install, test and run rebatch. See the file THEORY for details on how the package interacts with INN and nntplink.


Requirements

Both of these scripts require Perl and its libraries to be installed on your system. It runs under both Perl 4.036 and Perl 5.000 without modification.

rebatch has only been tested with INN 1.4 and nntplink. I use nntplink 3.3beta1PL3 (22-Jun-94) on Solaris 2.3. I have used it with nntplink 3.2.

Success has also been reported on:


Credits

rebatch was written solely by Russell Street.

Much inspiration was taken from INN, especially nntpsend and shlock.

Many thanks to my beta tester(s)

The documentation was written in html and nroff man macros. The plain text of the version of the html files was produced with lynx.

Availability and Distribution

An up-to-date copy of this package should be available from:
ftp://ftp.auckland.ac.nz/pub/news/rebatch.tar.gz
and online documentation from
http://www.auckland.ac.nz/cc/People/RS/rebatch/
rebatch may be freely distributed in its unmodified form. If you modify rebatch, and redistribute the modified package, you must clearly document your changes and make it clear that it is modified and where to get the original. Please give me credit for the work I have put into this.
Part of the rebatch package
Russell Street (r.street@auckland.ac.nz)
Last updated: 12th February 1995