pullnews is designed for very small sites that don't want to bother setting up traditional peering and is not meant for handling large feeds.

-c config

Normally, the config file is stored in ~/.pullnews for the user running pullnews. If -c is given, config will be used as the config file instead. This is useful if you're running pullnews as a system user on an automated basis out of cron rather than as an individual user.

-g groups

Specifies a collection of groups to get. groups is a list of newsgroups separated by commas (only commas, no spaces). Each group must be defined in the config file, and only the remote hosts that carry those groups will be contacted. Note that this is a simple list of groups, not a wildmat expression, and wildcards are not supported.

-h

Print a usage message and exit.

-p port

Connect to the destination news server on a port other than the default of 119. This option does not change the port used to connect to the remote news servers.

-q

Print out less status information while running.

-r file

Rather than feeding the downloaded articles to a local server, instead create a batch file that can later be fed to a server using rnews. See rnews(1) for more information about the batch file format.

-s to-server

Normally, pullnews will feed the articles it retrieves to the news server running on localhost. To connect to a different host, specify a server with the -s flag.

pullnews will update the config file to include the time the group was last checked and the highest numbered article successfully retrieved and transferred to the destination server. It uses this data to avoid doing duplicate work the next time it runs.

The full syntax is:

    <host> [<username> <password>]
            <group> [<time> <high>]
            <group> [<time> <high>]

where the <host> line must not have leading whitespace and the <group> lines must. Note that you may optionally specify a username and password for basic authentication to the remote server if necessary.

A typical configuration file would be:

    # Format group date high
    data.pa.vix.com
            rec.bicycles.racing 908086612 783
            rec.humor.funny 908086613 18
            comp.programming.threads
    nnrp.vix.com pull sekret
            comp.std.lisp

Note that an earlier run of pullnews has filled in details about the last article downloads from the two rec.* groups. The two comp.* groups were just added by the user and have not yet been checked.

The nnrp.vix.com server requires authentication, and pullnews will use the username "pull" and the password "sekret".