News batches follow a particular format that is the same for B News, C News, and INN. Each article is preceded by a line like this:

#! rnews count

count is the number of bytes in the article. When you use batch compression, the resulting file is compressed as a whole and preceded by another line, indicated by the message to be used for unpacking. The standard compression tool is compress, which is marked by:

#! cunbatch

Sometimes, when the news server sends batches via mail software that removes the eighth bit from all data, a compressed batch may be protected using what is called c7-encoding; these batches will be marked by c7unbatch.

When a batch is fed to rnews on the remote site, it checks for these markers and processes the batch appropriately. Some sites also use other compression tools, like gzip, and precede their gzipped files with the word zunbatch instead. C News does not recognize nonstandard headers like these; you have to modify the source to support them.

In C News, article batching is performed by /usr/lib/news/batch/sendbatches, which takes a list of articles from the site/togo file and puts them into several newsbatches. It should be executed once per hour, or even more frequently, depending on the volume of traffic. Its operation is controlled by the batchparms file in /var/lib/news. This file describes the maximum batch size allowed for each site, the batching and optional compression program to be used, and the transport for delivering it to the remote site. You may specify batching parameters on a per-site basis, as well as a set of default parameters for sites not explicitly mentioned.

When installing C News, you will most likely find a batchparms file in your distribution that contains a reasonable default entry, so there’s a good chance that you won’t have to touch the file. Just in case, we describe its format. Each line consists of six fields, separated by spaces or tabs:

               site 
               size 
               max 
               batcher 
               muncher 
               transport

To perform batching for a specific site, use the following command:

# su news -c "/usr/lib/news/batch/sendbatches site"

When invoked without arguments, sendbatches handles all batch queues. The interpretation of “all” depends on the presence of a default entry in batchparms. If one is found, all directories in /var/spool/news/out.going are checked; otherwise, sendbatches cycles through all entries in batchparms, processing just the sites found there. Note that sendbatches, when scanning the out.going directory, takes only those directories that contain no dots or at signs (@) as sitenames.

There are two commands that use uux to execute rnews on the remote system: viauux and viauuxz. The latter sets the -z flag for uux to keep older versions from returning success messages for each article delivered. Another command, viamail, sends article batches to the user rnews on the remote system via mail. Of course, this requires that the remote system somehow feeds all mail for rnews to its local news system. For a complete list of these transports, refer to the newsbatch manual page.

All commands from the last three fields must be located in either out.going/site or /usr/lib/news/batch. Most of them are scripts; you can easily tailor new tools for your personal needs. They are invoked through pipes. The list of articles is fed to the batcher on standard input, which produces the batch on standard output. This is piped into the muncher, and so on.

Here is a sample file:

# batchparms file for the brewery
# site        | size   |max    |batcher  |muncher    |transport
#-------------+--------+-------+---------+-----------+-----------
/default/       100000  22      batcher   compcun     viauux
swim             10000  10      batcher   nocomp      viauux