scanspool(8)

1SCANSPOOL(8)              InterNetNews Documentation              SCANSPOOL(8)
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NAME

6       scanspool - Perform a sanity scan over all articles in news spool
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SYNOPSIS

9       scanspool [-cnv] [-a active-file] [-s spool-dir]
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DESCRIPTION

12       scanspool is a Perl script for use with a tradspool article spool.  It
13       will scan the active file as well as all articles in the spool and
14       report on the errors it encounters.  As this may take a while, using
15       the -v switch is recommended to see how far the program has progressed.
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17       First, scanspool scans the active file, noting problems such as:
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19       •   malformed lines;
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21       •   newsgroups aliased to a non-existent newsgroup;
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23       •   newsgroups aliased to a newsgroup that is also aliased.
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25       Then it will examine all articles under your news spool directory,
26       complaining about articles that:
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28       •   have a basename that starts with a leading 0;
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30       •   have a basename that is out of range according to the active file;
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32       •   do not contain a Newsgroups header field;
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34       •   are all header and no text;
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36       •   are in a directory for which there is no newsgroup in the active
37           file;
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39       •   are in a newsgroup to which they do not belong.
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41       scanspool understands aliased newsgroups.  Thus, if an article is
42       posted to foo.old.name that is aliased to foo.bar, it will be expected
43       to be found under foo.bar and not foo.old.name.
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45       Articles posted to a newsgroup of status "j" or "x" (the fourth field
46       of the active file) will be expected to show up under the junk group.
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48       scanspool assumes that the path of a valid newsgroup's directory from
49       the root of the spool tree will not contain any "." character.  Thus,
50       directories such as out.going, tmp.dir, in.coming and news.archive will
51       not be searched.  This program also assumes that article basenames
52       contain only decimal digits.  Last, files under the top level directory
53       lost+found are not scanned.
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OPTIONS

56       -a active-file
57           The active file to use; pathdb/active is the default.
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59       -c  Only check article filenames.  scanspool will therefore not
60           actually scan the Newsgroups header field of the articles.
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62       -n  Don't throttle innd while scanning.
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64       -s spool-dir
65           The root of the spool tree; patharticles is the default.
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67       -v  Setting this flag enables a verbose mode.  scanspool will then
68           print which newsgroup is currently worked upon.  It will list all
69           the articles found in non-active directories (that is to say
70           articles sorted into groups no longer present in the active file),
71           rather than just printing the group once.
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DIAGNOSTICS

74       The output of scanspool will start with one of the following forms:
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76       "FATAL:" (to stderr)
77           Fatal or internal error.
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79       "WARN:" (to stderr)
80           active or article format problem, newsgroup alias problem, find(1)
81           error, article open error.
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83       "path/123:" (to stdout)
84           Issues such as:
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86           •   basename starts with 0;
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88           •   article number out of range;
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90           •   article in the wrong directory;
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92           •   article in a directory not related to an active non-aliased
93               newsgroup.
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95       "\t ..." (to stdout)
96           Verbose messages start with a tab.
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BUGS

99       scanspool is unable to detect and properly deal with spool formats
100       other than tradspool.  However, if the files that store your articles
101       are named other than just all-digits, they will simply be skipped (and
102       your active is still checked).
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104       scanspool only considers the first line of the Newsgroups header field.
105       Continuation lines are not taken into account.
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HISTORY

108       scanspool was written by Landon Curt Noll (chongo was here  /\../\).
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110       This manual page was written by Florian Schlichting, largely based on
111       comments in the script.
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