From: NN
Subject: nn-tk - efficient net news interface (No News is good news)

nn, nn-tk - efficient net news interface (No News is good news)


From: NN
Subject: SYNOPSIS

nn [ options ] [ newsgroup | +folder | file ]...
nn -g [ -r ]
nn -a0 [ newsgroup ]...
also nn-tk

From: NN
Subject: DESCRIPTION

Net news is a world-wide information exchange service covering numerous topics
in science and every day life. Topics are organized in news\ groups, and these
groups are open for everybody to post articles on a subject related to the
topic of the group.

Nn is a `point-and-shoot' net news interface program, or a news reader for
short (not to be confused with the human news reader). When you use nn, you
can decide which of the many news groups you are interested in, and you can
unsubscribe to those which don't interest you. nn will let you read the new
(and old) articles in each of the groups you subscribe to using a menu based
article selection prior to reading the articles in the news group.

    When a news group is entered, nn will locate all the presently unread
articles in the group, and extract their sender, subject, and other relevant
information. This information is then rearranged, sorted, and marked in
various ways to give it a pleasant format when it is presented on the screen.

    This will be done very quickly, because nn uses its own database to
maintain all the necessary information on a directly accessible form (this
database is built and maintained by the nnmaster(8) program).

    When the article menu appears on the screen, nn will be in a mode called
selection mode. In this mode, the articles which seems to be interesting can
be selected by single keystrokes (using the keys a-z and 0-9). When all the
interesting articles among the ones presently displayed have been selected,
the space bar is hit, which causes nn to enter reading mode.

    In reading mode, each of the selected articles will be presented. You use
the space bar to go on to the next page of the current article, or to the next
article. Of course, there are all sorts of commands to scroll text up and
down, skip to the next article, responding to an article, decrypt an article,
and so on.

    When all the selected articles in the current group have been read, the
last hit on the space bar will cause nn will continue to the next group with
unread articles, and enter selection mode on that group.

    NN can (if compiled for it) to read news via NNTP as well as local news
files.

From: NN
Subject: NN-TK

The TCL/TK code provides a GUI interface with command menus and buttons. .RS
The features include: .IP the use of the mouse to select articles .IP a
scrolling panel for displaying articles .IP group selection using either of
scrolling panel or cascading menus. .RE .RS If EXMH is available then there is
also: .IP an internal editor for posting items .IP the ability to send and
read MIME and PGP messages .IP the ability to turn URL's into buttons for
passing to MOSAIC (or another WWW reader). .RE

From: NN
Subject: FREQUENTLY USED OPTIONS

nn accepts a lot of command line options, but here only the frequently used
options are described. Options can also be set permanently by including
appropriate variable settings in the init file described later. All options
are described in the section on Command Line Options towards the end of this
manual.

The frequently used command line options are:

-a0  Catch up on unread articles and groups. See the section "Catch up" below.

-A   Don't read active file, instead use the .newsrc file for the list of
     groups, this can be useful for slow NNTP connections.

-g   Prompt for the name of a news group or folder to be entered (with
     completion).

-r   Used with -g to repeatedly prompt for groups to enter.

-lN  Print only the first N lines of the first page of each article before
     prompting to continue. This is useful on slow terminals and modem lines
     to be able to see the first few lines of longer articles.

-sWORD
     Collect only articles which contain the string WORD in their subject
     (case is ignored). This is normally combined with the -x and -m options
     to find all articles on a specific subject.

-s/regexp
     Collect only articles whose subject matches the regular expression regexp
     . This is normally combined with the -x and -m options to find all
     articles on a specific subject.

-nWORD or -n/regexp
     Same as -s except that it matches on the sender's name instead of the
     article's subject. This is normally combined with the -x and -m options
     to find all articles from a specific author. It cannot be mixed with the
     -s option!

-i   Normally searches with -n and -s are case independent. Using this option,
     the case becomes significant.

-m   Merge all articles into one `meta group' instead of showing them one
     group at a time. This is normally used together with the -x and -s
     options to get all the articles on a specific subject presented on a
     single menu (when you don't care about which group they belong to). When
     -m is used, no articles will be marked as read.

-R host
     Connect to the specified NNTP server

-x[N]
     Present (or scan) all (or the last N) unread as well as read articles.
     When this option is used, nn will never mark unread articles as read
     (i.e. .newsrc is not updated).

-X   Read/scan unsubscribed groups also. Most useful when looking for a
     specific subject in all groups, e.g.
           nn -mxX -sSubject all

news.group  or  file  or  +folder
     If none of these arguments are given, all subscribed news groups will be
     used. Otherwise, only the specified news groups and/or files will be
     collected and presented. In specifying a news groups, the following `meta
     notation' can be used:
     If the news group ends with a `.' (or `.all'), all subgroups of the news
     group will be collected, e.g.
           comp.sources. If a news group starts with a `.' (or `all.'), all the
     matching subgroups will be collected, e.g.
           .sources.unix The argument `all' identifies all (subscribed) news
     groups.

From: NN
Subject: COMMAND INPUT

In general, nn commands consist of one or two key-strokes, and nn reacts
instantly to the commands you give it; you don't have to enter return after
each command (except where explicitly stated).

Some commands have more serious effects than others, and therefore nn requests
you to confirm the command. You confirm by hitting the the y key, and reject
by hitting the n key. Some `trivial' requests may also be confirmed simply by
hitting space. For example, to confirm the creation of a save file, just hit
space, but if one or more directories also have to be created, you must enter
y.

Many commands will require that you enter a line of text, e.g. a file name or
a shell command. If you enter space as the first character on a line, the line
will be filled with a default value (if one is defined). For example, the
default value for a file name is the last file name you have entered, and the
default shell command is your previous shell command. You can edit this
default value as well as a directly typed text, using the following editing
commands. The erase, kill, and interrupt keys are the keys defined by the
current tty settings. On systems without job control, the suspend key will be
control-Z while it is the current suspend character on system with job
control.

erase
     Delete the last character on the line.

delete-word   (normally ^W)
     Delete the last word or component of the input.

kill
     Delete all characters on the line.

interrupt  and  control-G
     Cancel the command which needs the input.

suspend
     Suspend nn if supported by the system. Otherwise, spawn an interactive
     shell.

return
     Terminate the line, and continue with the command.

Related variables: erase-key, flow-control, flush-typeahead, help-key,
kill-key, word-key.

From: NN
Subject: BASIC COMMANDS

There are numerous commands in nn, and most of them can be invoked by a single
keystroke. The descriptions in this manual are based on the standard bindings
of the commands to the keys, but it is possible to customize these using the
map command described later. For each of the keystroke commands described in
this manual, the corresponding command name will also be shown in curly
braces, e.g. {command}.

The following commands work in both selection mode and in reading mode. The
notation ^X means `control X':

?	{help}
     Help. Gives a one page overview of the commands available in the current
     mode.

^L	{redraw}
     Redraw screen.

^R	{redraw}
     Redraw screen (Same as ^L).

^P	{message}
     Repeat the last message shown on the message line. The command can be
     repeated to successively show previous messages (the maximum number of
     saved messages is controlled via the message-history variable.)

!	{shell}
     Shell escape. The user is prompted for a command which is executed by
     your favorite shell (see the shell variable). Shell escapes are described
     in detail later on.

Q	{quit}
     Quit nn. When you use this command, you neither lose unread articles in
     the current group nor the selections you might have made (unless the
     articles are expired in the meantime of course).

V	{version}
     Print release and version information.

:command  {command}
     Execute the command by name. This form can be used to invoke any of nn's
     commands, also those which cannot be bound to a key (such as :coredump),
     or those which are not bound to a key by default (such as post and
     unshar).

Related and basic variables: backup, backup-suffix, confirm-auto-quit, expert,
mail, message-history, new-group-action, newsrc, quick-count.

From: NN
Subject: SELECTION MODE

In selection mode, the screen is divided into four parts: the header line
showing the name of the news group and the number of articles, the menu lines
which show the collected articles - one article per line, the prompt line
where you enter commands, and the message line where nn prints various
messages to you.

Each menu line begins with an article id which is a unique letter (or digit if
your screen can show more than 26 menu lines). To select an articles for
reading, you simply enter the corresponding id, and the menu line will be
high-lighted to indicate that the article is selected. When you have selected
all the interesting articles on the present menu, you simply hit space.

If there are more articles collected for the current group than could be
presented on one screenful of text, you will be presented with the next
portion of articles to select from. When you have had the opportunity to
select among all the articles in the group, hitting space will enter reading
mode.

If no articles have been selected in the current group, hitting space will
enter selection mode on the next news group, or exit nn if the current group
was the last news group with unread articles. It is thus possible to go
through ALL unread articles (without reading any of them) just by hitting
space a few times.

The articles will be presented on the menu using one of the following layouts:

0:   x Name......... Subject.............. +123

1:   x Name......... 123 Subject..............

2:   x 123 Subject...................................

3:   x Subject...........................................

4:   x Subject........................................

Here x is the letter or digit that must be entered to select the article, Name
is the real name of the sender (or the mail address if the real name cannot be
found), Subject is the contents of the "Subject:" line in the article, and 123
is the number of lines in the article.

Layout 0 and 1 are just two ways to present the same information, while layout
2 and 3 are intended for groups whose articles have very long subject lines,
e.g. comp.sources.

    Layout 4 is a hybrid between layout 1 and 3. It will normally use layout 1,
but it will use layout 3 (with a little indentation) for menu lines where the
subject is longer than the space available with layout 1.

Layout 1 is the default layout, and an alternative menu line layout is
selected using the -L option or by setting the layout variable. Once nn is
started the layout can be changed at any time using the " key {layout}.

The Name is limited to 16 characters, and to make maximum use of this space,
nn will perform a series of simplifications on the name, e.g. changing first
names into initials, removing domain names from mail addresses (if the real
name is not found) etc. It does a good job, but some people on the net put
weird things into the From: field (or actually into their password file) which
result in nn producing quite cryptic, and sometimes funny "names".

One a usual 80 column terminal, the Subject is limited to about 60 characters
(75 in layout 3) and is thus only an approximation to the actual subject line
which may be much longer. To get as much out of this space, Re: prefixes (in
various forms) are recognized and replaced by a single `>' character (see the
re-layout variable).

    Since articles are sorted according to the subject, two or more adjacent
articles may share the same subject (ignoring any `>'s). In this case, only
the first article will show the subject of the article; the rest will only
show the `>' character in the subject field (or a `-' if there is no `>' at
the beginning of the line). A typical menu will thus only show each subject
once, saving a lot of time in scanning the news articles.

If consolidated menus (see section below) are enabled, adjacent articles
sharing the same subject will be shown with a single line on the menu
corresponding to the first of the articles. The number of articles with the
same subject will be shown as a braketed number in front of the subject, e.g.
with layout 1:
      x Name......... 123 [4] Subject.............. For further information see
the section on consolidated menus below.

Related variables: collapse-subject, columns, confirm-entry,
confirm-entry-limit, entry-report-limit, fsort, kill, layout, limit, lines,
long-menu, re-layout, repeat, slow-mode, sort, sort-mode, split,
subject-match-limit, subject-match-offset, subject-match-parts,
subject-match-minimum.

From: NN
Subject: NN-TK USE

NN-TK follows the NN reading method where all the desired articles of each
group are slected and then read, all the normal NN keys and commands can be
used. The left mouse button can be used for selecting articles and dragged to
select a range of articles. The PAGE buttons are the equivalent of SPACE key
and provides paging through groups, subject and articles reading any selected
articles. .BR The right mouse button is used for the immediate reading of
selected articles

The mouse button usage differ between TK V3 and TK V4

TK V3
     Dragging Control-mouse-button-1 will scroll text windows, entries and
     lists.
     Drag Mouse-button-1 for selection
     Shift-Mouse-button-1 will extend the selection
     Mouse-button-2 when selecting a menu will tear off the menu
     Mouse-button-2 in an entry field will paste in the X selection

TK V4
     Dragging Mouse-button-2 will scroll text windows, entries and lists.
     Mouse-button-2 in an entry field will paste in the X selection
     Drag Mouse-button-1 for selection, dragging it outside the widget scrolls
     the widget
     Shift-Mouse-button-1 will extend the selection
     EMACS commands work on entry and text areas

From: NN
Subject: NN-TK MAIN WINDOW


The main window is divided into the article menu and article display, with the
group list window optionally attached to left side.

    For a lot of nn fuctions that require a dialog a popup will appear at the
top of the main menu and provide text based interaction, it also provides
progress reporting for various activities such a decoding uuencoded articles.
Some functions such as posting have their own specialised popups.

ARTICLE SELECTION
     Articles can be selected either by normal nn methods (the characters a-z
     0-9) or by the left mouse button. Dragging with the button depressed
     selects a range of articles.
     The right mouse button selects an article and goes into immediate read
     mode

TOP ROW
     The top row of buttons (apart from quit) are popup menus. .RS .IP Groups
     cascading menus of all news groups. .IP article functions related to
     single articles .RS .IP "Post news" Post a news article .IP "Followup
     news" Followup a news article .IP "Mail article" Mail a news article to
     someone .IP "Mail reply" Reply to a news article via mail .IP "Process
     articles" .RS .IP "Turn URLs into Buttons" Scan the news item and turn
     anything that looks like a URL into buttons that call up a WWW browser to
     fetch that item. .IP "Treat selection as URL" Pass the current selection
     to a WWW browser .IP "View using PGP" Process the current article with
     PGP to decode or verify signature .IP "decode, patch, print, unshar" Pass
     the article for the given processing .RE .IP "Save articles" Save the
     article to a file .IP misc Misc functions that can be applied to an
     artice .RE .IP menu functions related to article selection menu .RS .IP
     "sort type" Sort the article menu according to various criteria .IP
     "consolidated menu" Collapse/expand all items with the same subject
     to/from a single menu item .IP "menu mode" various nn function do with
     the article menu .IP "menu misc" misc nn functions .RE .IP functs .RS .IP
     "reload groups" Update the groups list by rereading the active file .IP
     "make window" Popup the folder window or the group list if it is a
     separate window. .IP "define Kill/Select" Article auto kill/select setup
     .IP "cancel articles" Cancel articles you have sent .IP "unsubscribe
     group" .IP "previous message" Display previous nn error messages .RE .IP
     USER user definable menu .IP info Various information and help functions
     .RS .IP "nn-tk Help" nn-tk specific help items .IP "nn Help" general nn
     help items .IP "show info" various nn information items .IP "Compose key
     sequences" Description of sequences for entering non ascii characters
     using the internal editor .IP "Man" Access the nn man page as a set of
     news items .RE .IP setup nn-tk configuration menu .RS .IP "Save Window
     Geometry" save the size/position of any currently displayed windows .IP
     "Key bindings" Set the key bindings for the EXMH simple editor and Entry
     widget .IP "Exmh option" set the EXMH options. Help available by clicking
     on the labels .RS .IP "Simple Editor" options for the internal editor .IP
     MIME Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extension processing options .IP WWW
     options for calling WWW browsers .IP "FS Box" options for file requestor
     used with internal editor .IP "PGP interface" configuring the use of PGP
     for encrypted messages .RE .IP "NN-TK General" config options. Help is
     displayed on top panel when mouse is on an item. .IP "NN-TK Group List"
     options to do with the group list .IP "NN-TK Group Cascade Menu" options
     to do with cascading group menus .RE .IP "user command menu" define
     labels and commands for USER menu .IP "NN variables" alter nn variables,
     these changes are stored in ~/.nn/tk-init-nn and override the settings in
     ~/.nn/init. The (all) is to access all the nn variables and the
     (modified) for just those that are different from the default .RE

MIDDLE ROW
     The middle row of buttons are related to the articles menu panel .RS .IP
     PrevG return to previous group read .IP < previous page of article menu
     .IP = return to article selection menu mode .IP > next page of article
     menu .IP read/skip read items if any have been selected otherwise skip
     group .IP nextG leave group while not marking the articles as read .IP
     PAGE same as the NN space key, pages through articles,
           pages through article menu, if at end do a read/skip .RE

NOTE This version of NN is still somewhat modal, if there is a dark
     highlighted article in the the article menu NN is in reading mode,
     otherwise it is in article selection mode. The = button goes from article
     mode to menu mode. It is generally not necessary

BOTTOM ROW
     The bottom row of buttons deal with the article display. .RS .IP / search
     forward in the article .IP entry widget for search string .IP backslash
     search backwards in article .IP Mono toggle mono-space font for article
     .IP n-subj skip articles in with current subject .IP previous previous
     article .IP next skip current article .IP PAGE as above .RE

From: NN
Subject: NN-TK SEDIT

This is the EXMH built-in editor, sedit, it has a dozen or so commonly used
editing operations bound to keystrokes. These are Emacs-like, but you can
change them from within the editor through the "Key bindings" dialog available
under the main "Setup" menu. In addition, the editor has a number of buttons
and menu entries used to manipulate your draft messages. .IP Abort This
deletes the draft message and removes the editor window. .IP Help This button
brings up a window with a short explanation of the editor. .IP Sign This
appends your ~/.signature file to the draft. If this file is instead an
executable script or program, it is executed in order to generate the
signature. .IP Sign... If you have multiple files that match the ~/.signature*
pattern, the Sign button is replaced with a menu of possibilities. If you
choose the autoSign Simple Editor Preference, then this menu is used to choose
which signature file (or program) is used when automatically signing the
message as it gets posted. .IP Send When you are done with the message, click
Send. .IP Text... This menu is used to add bold, italic, underline, etc. to
your messages. This results in a MIME message of type text/enriched. The
formatting commands are supposed to be palatable to a non-MIME reader, but you
may want to take this into consideration. If you disable the "Format mail"
setting (described below), the looks are discarded before sending the message.
.IP More... This menu contains a few entries for less common operations. They
are: .IP "Keep on send" This is a checkbox menu item that is off
(un-highlighted) by default. If selected it prevents the editor window from
disappearing after you send or abort a message. This is useful if you'd like
to compose a few similar messges. (I also use it to debug the enriched text
formatter.) .IP "Format mail" This is a checkbox menu item that is enabled
(highlighted) by default. Formatting means to break long lines (> 80
characters). This is done as the file is saved, not as you type. So, while the
Tk text widget does line wrapping while you enter text, sedit does not break
these lines until you go to send the message. If you insert a file into a
message that has critical formatting, you may want to disable the Format
option. .IP "Quote Printable" If this is selected, then any text MIME parts
are run through the quoted-printable encoder to wrap up 8-bit characters in a
7-bit safe encoding. The Quoted Printable default preference setting under
Simple Editor can be set to automatic, never, or always. In automatic mode,
quoting is enabled when you enter a Compose key sequence to generate an 8-bit
character. .IP "Insert File..." This brings up a dialog box that lets you
insert a file into the message. .IP "Insert Part..." This is similar to Insert
File, except that it creates a MIME multipart message structure to wrap up the
inserted file. It tries to determine the type of the file based on
nametemplate entries in the metamail mailcap description file. It presents a
dialog that lets you override the type, add a Content-Description, and choose
an encoding for the file. When you insert the first Part of a message you are
asked whether or not to save the existing message body. If you save it, it
becomes the text/plain first part of the multipart message. .IP "Insert
External..." This sets up an Message/External-Body MIME message part. This is
useful for sending around pointers to files available via FTP or on your local
file system. .IP "Insert PGP Keys..." Insert your PGP keys into the mail
message.. .IP "Spell..." This runs the UNIX spell command over the draft body
and puts the results into a second pane inside the editor window. That's all -
nothing fancy. .IP "Find SEL" This searches the draft for the current X
selection. The intent is that you select mispelled words in the output of the
spell command and use this menu entry to locate them in the draft. .IP "Save
Buffer" This saves the editor buffer into a file in your drafts folder. Most
likely you really want the "Keep on Send" function instead of Save, because
that function preserves the draft after you send it, while ordinarily (in
spite of "Save") MH will rename the draft after you send it. .IP "Mime
Preview" This displays the message as it will appear when an exmh user
receives it. A detached top-level window is used, as with message Clip. .IP
"PGP..." This is a menu of options that use the Pretty Good Privacy package to
to encryption and authentication. An explaination of pgp is beyond the scope
of this manual. This works by inserting a header into your message that
indicates what action to do. The actual encryption or whatever is done after
you hit the Send button. If you use an external editor you can insert the
headers in that, and exmh will run your message through PGP for you when you
send it. The four supported headers are: .DS pgp-action: signclear pgp-action:
signbinary pgp-action: encrypt pgp-action: encryptsign .DE

From: NN
Subject: ARTICLE ATTRIBUTES

While nn is running and between invocations, nn associates an attribute with
each article on your system. These attributes are used to differentiate
between read and unread articles, selected articles, articles marked for later
treatment, etc. Depending on how nn is configured, these attributes can be
saved between invocations of nn, or some of them may only be used while nn is
running.

The attribute is shown on the menu using either a single character following
the article id or by high-lighting the menu line, depending on the attribute
and the capabilities of the terminal. You can also change the attributes to
your own taste (see the attributes variable).

The attribute of an article can be changed explicitly using the selection mode
commands described below, or it will change automatically for example when you
have read or saved a selected article. If a command may change any article
attributes, it will be noted in the description of the command. The following
descriptions of the attributes will only mention the most important commands
that may set (or preserve) the attribute.

The following attributes may be associated with an article:

read Menu attribute "." - indicates that the article has been read or saved.
     When you leave the group, these articles will be marked permanently read,
     and are not presented the next time you enter the group.

seen Menu attribute "," - indicates that the article is unread, but that it
     has been presented on a menu. Depending on how nn is configured, these
     articles will automatically be marked read when you leave the group, they
     may remain seen, or they may just be unread the next time you enter the
     group (see the auto-junk-seen, confirm-junk-seen, and retain-seen-status
     variables).
     Only the commands continue (space) and read-skip (X) will mark unread
     articles on the current (or all) menu pages as seen when they are used.
     Other commands that scroll through the menu pages or enter reading mode
     will let unread articles remain unread.

unread
     Menu attribute " " - indicates an unread article. These articles were
     unread when you entered the group, and they may remain unread when you
     leave the group, unless they have been marked seen by the command that
     you used to leave the group or enter reading mode.

selected
     Menu line high-lighted (or menu attribute "*") - indicates that you have
     selected the article. If you leave the group, the selected articles will
     remain selected the next time you enter the group. When you have read a
     selected article, the attribute will automatically change to read.

auto-selected
     These articles have the same appearance as selected articles on the menu,
     and the only difference is that these articles have been selected
     automatically via the auto-selection facility rather than manually by
     you. Very few commands differentiate between these attributes and if they
     do, it is explicitly stated in this manual. The main difference is that
     these articles are only marked as unread when you leave the group
     (supposing they will also be auto-selected the next the group is
     entered). This simplifies the house-keeping between invocations of nn.

leave
     Menu attribute "+" - indicates that the article is marked for later
     treatment by the leave-article (l) command. These articles may be
     selected (on demand) when you have read all selected articles in a group.
     However, if you do not select them then immediately, they are stored as
     the leave-next attribute described below.

leave-next
     Menu attribute "=" - indicates that the article is marked for later
     treatment by the leave-next (L) command. This is a permanent attribute,
     which will remain on the article until you either read the article,
     change the attribute, or it is expired. So assinging this attribute to an
     article will effectively keep it unread until you do something. If the
     variable select-leave-next is set, nn will ask whether these articles
     should be selected on entry to a group (but naturally, doing so will
     change the leave-next attribute to select).

cancelled
     Menu attribute "#" - indicates that the article has been cancelled. This
     is mainly useful when tidying a folder; it is set by the cancel (C)
     command, and can be cleared by any command that change attributes, e.g.
     you can select and deselect the article.

killed
     Menu attribute "!" - indicates that the article has been killed (e.g. by
     the K {kill-select} command). Killed articles are immediately removed
     from the menu, so you should not normally see articles with this
     attribute. If you do, report it as a bug!

The attributes are saved in two files: .newsrc (read articles) and .nn/select
(other attributes). Plain unread articles are saved by not occurring in either
of these files. Both files are described in more detail later on.

Related variables: attributes, auto-junk-seen, confirm-junk-seen,
retain-seen-status, select-leave-next.

From: NN
Subject: SELECTION MODE COMMANDS

The primary purpose of the selection mode is of course to select the articles
to be read, but numerous other commands may also be performed in this mode:
saving of articles in files, replying and following up on articles,
mailing/forwarding articles, shell escapes etc.

    As described above, the selected articles are marked either by showing the
corresponding menu line in standout mode (reverse video), or if the terminal
does not have this capability by placing an asterisk (*) after the selection
letter or digit.

Most commands which are used to select articles will work as toggle commands.
If the article is not already selected, the selectedattribute on the
article(s), independent on the previous attribute. Otherwise, the article(s)
will be deselected and marked unread. Consequently, any article can be marked
unread simply be selecting and deselecting it.

During selection, the cursor will normally be placed on the article following
the last article whose attribute was changed (initially the first article).
The article pointed out by the cursor is called the current article, and the
following commands work relative to the current article and cursor position.

abc...z 01..9  {article N}
     The article with the given identification letter or digit is selected or
     deselected. The following article becomes the current article. If the
     variable auto-select-subject is set, all articles with the same subject
     as the given article are selected.

.	{select}
     Select or deselect the current article and move the cursor to the next
     article.

,	{line+1}
     Move the cursor to the next article. You can use the down arrow as well.

/	{line-1}
     Move cursor to previous article. You can use the up arrow as well.

*	{select-subject}
     Select or deselect all articles with same subject as current article.
     This will work across several menu pages if necessary.

-x	{select-range}
     Select or deselect the range of articles between the current article and
     the article specified by x. For example you can select all articles from
     e to k by simply typing e-k.

The following commands may change the attributes on all articles on the
current menu page, or on all articles on all menu pages.

@	{select-invert}
     Reverse selections. All selected articles on the current page are
     deselected, and vice-versa. (Use the find command to select all
     articles.)

~	{unselect-all}
     Deselect all auto-selected articles in the group (this works across all
     menu pages). If the command is executed twice, the selected articles will
     also be deselected.

+	{select-auto}
     Perform auto-selections in the group (see the section on "auto
     kill/select" below).

=	{find}
     Prompts for a regular expression, and selects all articles on the menu
     (all pages) which matches the regular expression. Depending on the
     variable select-on-sender matching is performed against the subject
     (default) or the sender of the articles. An empty answer (= return) will
     reuse the previous expression. Example: The command = . return will
     select all articles in the group.

J	{junk-articles}
     This is a very versatile command which can be used to perform all sorts
     of attribute changes, either on individual articles, all articles on the
     current menu page, all articles with a specific attribute, or all
     available articles. To access all the functions of this command, the J
     key may have to be hit up to four times, to loop through different
     one-line menus. The full functionality of the junk-articles command is
     described in a separate section below.

L	{leave-next}
     This is a specialized version of the generic J {junk-articles} command to
     set the leave-next attribute on a subset of the articles on the menu. It
     is also described further below.

The following commands move between the pages belonging to the same news group
when there are more articles than will fit on a single page. These commands
will not change any article attributes.

>	{page+1}
     Goto next menu page.

<	{page-1}
     Goto previous menu page, or to last menu page if on first menu page.

$	{page=$}
     Goto last menu page.

^	{page=1}
     Goto first menu page.

The following commands are used to enter reading mode for the selected
articles, and to move between news groups (in selection mode). They may change
article attributes if noted below.

space	{continue}
     Continue to next menu page, or if on last menu page, read the selected
     articles. If no articles have been selected, continue to the next news
     group. The unread articles on the current menu page will automatically be
     marked seen.

return	{continue-no-mark}
     Identical to the continue command, except that the unread articles on the
     current menu page will remain unread. (The newline key has the same
     effect).

Z	{read-return}
     Enter reading mode immediately with the currently selected articles. When
     all articles have been read, return to selection mode in the current
     group. It will mark selected articles read as they are read, but unread
     articles are not normally changed (can be controlled with the variable
     marked-by-read-return.)

X	{read-skip}
     Mark all unmarked articles seen on all menu pages (or the pages defined
     by the marked-by-read-skip variable), and enter reading mode immediately
     with the currently selected articles. As the selected articles are read,
     they are marked read. When all selected articles have been read, nn will
     enter selection mode in the next news group. When no articles are
     selected, it goes directly to the next group. This can be used to skip
     all the articles in a large news group without having to go through all
     the menu pages.

If you don't want to read the current group now, but want to keep it for
later, you can use the following commands which will only mark seen and read
articles as read. Currently selected articles will still be selected the next
time you enter the group. None of these commands will change any attributes
themselves (by default).

N	{next-group}
     Go forward to the next group in the presentation sequence. If the
     variable marked-by-next-group is set articles on the menu can optionally
     be marked seen

P	{previous}
     Go back to the previous group. This command will enter selection mode on
     the last active group (two P commands in sequence will bring you to the
     current group). If there are still some unread articles in the group,
     only those articles will be shown. Otherwise, all the articles which were
     unread when nn was invoked will be shown marked with the read attribute
     (which can be changed as usual).

As described in the "Article Attributes" section, the read and seen articles
will normally be marked read when you leave the group, and these articles are
not shown the next time you enter the group.

In all releases prior to release 6.4, it was impossible to have individual
articles in a group marked unread when you left a group, and the default
behaviour of release 6.4 onwards will closely match the traditional behaviour.
This means that the seen and read articles are treated alike for most
practical purposes with the default variable settings.

If you don't like nn to silently mark the seen articles read, you can set the
variable confirm-junk-seen to get nn to prompt you for confirmation before
doing this, or you can unset the variable auto-junk-seen to simply keep the
seen articles for the next time you enter the group. You then have to use the
J {junk-articles} to mark articles read.

Using return {continue-no-mark} will also allow you to keep articles unread
rather than marking them seen when scrolling through the menu pages and
entering reading mode. If this is your preferred reading style, you can remap
space to this command.

Other commands

 {reload}
     Update group information by rereading active file

Related variables: auto-junk-seen, auto-preview-mode, auto-select-subject,
case-fold-search, confirm-auto-quit, confirm-entry, confirm-junk-seen,
marked-by-next-group, marked-by-read-return, marked-by-read-skip,
retain-seen-status, select-on-sender.

From: NN
Subject: CONSOLIDATED MENUS

Normally, nn will use one menu line for each article, so if there are many
articles with identical subjects, each menu page will only contain a few
different subjects. To have each subject occur only once on the menu, nn can
operate with consolidated menus by setting the variable consolidated-menu.

When consolidated menus are used, nn operates with two kinds of subjects: open
and closed.

An open subject is a subject which is shown in the traditional way with one
menu line for each article with the given subject. In other words, when
consolidated menus are not used, all subjects are open (by default).

A closed subject is a multi-article subject which is presented by a single
menu line. This line will be the normal menu line for the first (oldest)
article with the subject, but with the subject field annotated with a
bracketed number showing the number of articles with that subject, e.g.
      a Kim F. Storm 12 [4] Future plans for nn
      b.Kim F. Storm 43 [3] More plans for nn
In this example, there are four unread articles with subject `a' of which the
first is posted by me and has 12 lines. The rest of the articles are hidden,
and will only be shown on request. The `.' marker on subject `b' shows that
all three articles within that subject have been read (or seen).

To select (or deselect) ALL the articles within a closed subject, simply
select the article shown on the menu; this will automatically select (or
deselect) the rest (see auto-select-closed). When all the unread articles
within a closed subject are selected, the menu line will be high-lighted.

If you want to view the individual articles in a subject (maybe to select
individual articles), you can open the subject with the commands:

(x   Open subject x on menu.

((   Open current subject.

When you have completed viewing the opened subject, you can close it again
using the commands:

)x   Close subject x on menu (x is any article with the subject).

))   Close current subject.

In the basic layout of the menu line for a closed subject as shown above, ALL
articles in the closed subject are supposed to be either:

unread
     The menu line is not high-lighted.

selected
     Menu line is fully high-lighted (if all UNREAD are selected).

read/seen
     There is a `.' (read attribute) following the article id.

If neither of these cases apply, i.e. there is a mixture of unread, selected,
and seen/read articles, the bracketed number will have one of the following
formats:

[U:T]
     There are U unread articles of T total (U<T).

[S/T]
     There are S selected articles of T total (S<U=T).

[S/U:T]
     There are S selected of U unread of T total (S<U<T).

If there are any selected articles (S>0), the information between the brackets
will be high-lighted (to show that something is selected, but not all the
unread articles).

Notice: Consolidated menus only work with the `subject' and `lexical' sorting
methods.

Variables related to consolidated menus are: auto-select-closed,
consolidated-menu, counter-delim-left, counter-delim-right, counter-padding,
save-closed-mode.

From: NN
Subject: THE JUNK-ARTICLES AND LEAVE-NEXT COMMANDS

The J {junk-articles} command is a very flexible command which can perform all
sorts of attribute changes, either on individual articles, all articles on the
current menu page, all articles with a specific attribute, or all available
articles.

To access all the functions of this command, the J key may have to be hit up
to four times, to loop through different one-line menus:

Mark Read
     This submenu allows you to mark articles read.

Unmark
     This submenu allows you to mark articles unread.

Select
     This submenu allows you to select articles based on their attribute.

Kill This submenu allows you to mark articles read and remove them from the
     menu based on their attribute.

The L {leave-next} command is an extension of the J command with a fifth menu:

Leave
     This menu allows you to mark articles for later handling with the
     leave-next attribute which will keep the article unread until you
     explicitly change the attribute (e.g. by reading it) or it is expired.

For each of these submenus, nn will list the most plausible choices you may
use, but all of the following answers can be used at all submenus. When you
have entered a choice, nn will afterward ask whether the change should be made
to all menu pages or only the current page.

J    Show next submenu.

L    Change attribute on all leave articles.

N    Change attribute on all leave-next articles.

R    Change attribute on all read articles.

S    Change attribute on all seen articles.

U    Change attribute on all unmarked (i.e. unread) articles.

A    Change attribute on all articles no matter their current attribute.

*    Change attribute on all selected articles on the current page.

+    Change attribute on all selected articles on all pages.

a-z0-9
     Change attribute on one or more specific articles on the current page.
     You end the list of articles by a space or by using one of the other
     choices described above.

.    Change attribute on current article.

, /  Move the current article down or up the menu without changing any
     attributes.

From: NN
Subject: READING MODE COMMANDS

In reading mode, the selected articles are presented one page at a time. To
get the next page of an article, simply hit space, and when you are on the
last page of an article, hit space to get to the next selected article.
Articles are normally marked read when you go to the next article, while going
back to the menu, quitting nn, etc. will retain the attribute on the current
article.

When you are on the last page of the last article, hit space to enter
selection mode on the next group (or the current group if reading mode was
entered using the Z command).

To read an article, the following text scrolling commands are available:

space	{continue}
     Scroll one page forward or continue with the next article or group as
     described above.

backspace / delete  {page-1}
     Go one page backwards in article.

d	{page+1/2}
     Scroll one half page forward.

u	{page-1/2}
     Go one half page backwards.

return	{line+1}
     Scroll one line forward in the article.

tab	{skip-lines}
     Skip over lines starting with the same character as the last line on the
     current page. This is useful to skip over included text or to the next
     file in a shell archive.

^	{page=1}
     Move to the first page (excluding the header) of the article.

$	{page=$}
     Move to the last page of the article.

gN	{line=@}
     Move to line N in the article.

/regexp	{find}
     Search forward for text matching the regular expression regexp in the
     article. If a matching text is found, it will be high-lighted.

.	{find-next}
     Repeat search for last regular expression.

h	{page=0}
     Show the header of the article, and continue from the top of the article.

H	{full-digest}
     If the current article is extracted from a digest, show the entire digest
     article including its header. Another H command will return to the
     current subarticle.

D	{rot13}
     Turn rot13 (caesar) decryption on and off for the current article, and
     redraw current page. If the article is saved while it is decrypted on the
     screen, it will be saved in decrypted form as well!

c	{compress}
     Turn compression on and off for the current article and redraw current
     page. With compression turned on, multiple spaces and tabs are shown as a
     single space. This makes it much easier to read right justified text
     which separate words with several spaces. (See also the compress
     variable)

The following commands are used to move among the selected articles.

n	{next-article}
     Move to next selected article. This command skips the rest of the current
     article, marks it read, and jumps directly to the first page of the next
     selected article (or to the next group if it was the last selected
     article).

l	{leave-article}
     Mark the current article with the leave attribute and continue with the
     next selected article. When all the selected articles in the current
     group have been read, these left over articles can be automatically
     selected and shown once more, or the treatment can be postponed to the
     next time you enter the group.
           This is particularly useful if you see an article which you may want
     to respond to unless one the following articles is already saying what
     you intended to say.

L	{leave-next}
     Mark the current article with the leave-next attribute and continue with
     the next selected article.

p	{previous}
     Goto previous article.

k	{next-subject}
     Kill subject. Skips rest of current article, and all following articles
     with the same subject. The skipped articles are marked read. To kill a
     subject permanently use the K command.

*	{select-subject}
     Show next article with same subject (even if it is not selected). This
     command will select all following articles with the same subject as the
     current article (similar to the `*' command in selection mode). This can
     be used to select only the first article on a subject in selection mode,
     and then select all follow-ups in reading mode if you find the article
     interesting.

a	{advance-article}
     Goto the following article on the menu even if it is not selected. This
     command skips the rest of the current article and jumps directly to the
     first page of the next article (it will not skip to the next group if it
     is the last article). The attribute on the current article will be
     restored, except for the unread attribute which will be changed to seen.

b	{back-article}
     Goto the article before current article on the menu even if it is not
     selected. This is similar to the a command, except for the direction.

The following commands perform an immediate return from reading mode to
selection mode in the current group or skip to the next group.

=	{goto-menu}
     Return to selection mode in the current group (think of = as the "icon"
     of the selection menu). The articles read so far will be marked read.

N	{next-group}
     Skip the rest of the selected and unread articles in the current group
     and go directly to the next group. Only the read (and seen) articles in
     the current group are marked as read.

X	{read-skip}
     Mark all articles in the current group as read and go directly to the
     next group. (You will be asked to confirm this command.)

Related variables: case-fold-search, charset, compress, data-bits, date,
header-lines, mark-overlap, monitor, overlap, scroll-clear-page, stop,
trusted-escape-codes, wrap-header-margin.

From: NN
Subject: PREVIEWING ARTICLES IN SELECTION MODE

In selection mode, it is possible to read a specific article on the menu
without entering reading mode for all the selected articles on the menu. Using
the commands described below will enter reading mode for one article only, and
then return to the menu mode immediately after (depending on the setting of
the preview-continuation variable).

    If there are more than 5 free lines at the bottom of the menu screen, nn
will use that space to show the article (a minimal preview window can be
permanently allocated with the window variable). Otherwise, the screen will be
cleared to show the article.

    After previewing an article, it will be marked read (if the
preview-mark-read variable is set), and the following article will become the
current article.

%x	{preview}
     Preview article x.

%%	{preview}
     Preview the current article.

When the article is being shown, the following reading mode commands are very
useful:

=	{goto-menu}
     Skip the rest of the current article, and return to menu mode.

n	{next-article}
     Skip the rest of the current article, and preview the next article.

l	{leave-article}
     Mark the article as selected (!) on the menu for handling later on. Then
     skip the rest of the current article, and preview the next article.

%y	{preview}
     Preview article y .

If the variable auto-preview-mode is set, just hitting the article id in menu
mode will enter preview mode on the specified article.

Related variables: auto-preview-mode, min-window, preview-continuation,
preview-mark-read, window.

From: NN
Subject: SAVING ARTICLES

The following commands are used to save articles in files, unpack archives,
decode binaries, etc. It is possible to use the commands in both reading mode
to save the current article and in selection mode to save one or more articles
on the menu.

The saved articles will be appended to the specified file(s) followed by an
empty line each. Both files and directories will be created as needed. When an
article has been saved in a file, a message reporting the number of lines
saved will be shown if the save-report variable is set (default on).

S	{save-full}
     Save articles including the full article header.

O	{save-short}
     Save articles with a short header containing only the name of the sender,
     the subject, and the posting date of the article.

W	{save-body}
     Write article without a header.

:print	{print}
     Print article. Instead of a file name, this command will prompt for the
     print command to which the current article will be piped. The default
     print command is specified at compile time, but it can be changed by
     setting the printer variable. The output will be identical to that of the
     O command.

:patch	{patch}
     Send articles through patch(1) (or the program defined in the
     patch-command variable). Instead of a file name, you will be prompted for
     the name of a directory in which you want the patch command to be
     executed. nn will then pipe the body of the article through the patch
     command.
           The output from the patch process will be shown on the screen and
     also appended to a file named Patch.Result in the patch directory.

:unshar	{unshar}
     Unshar articles. You will be prompted for the name of a directory in
     which you want nn to unshar the articles. nn will then pipe the proper
     parts of the article body into a Bourne Shell whose working directory
     will be set to the specified directory.
           During the unpacking, the normal output from the unshar process will
     appear on the screen, and the menu or article text will be redrawn when
     the process is finished.
           The output is also appended to a file named Unshar.Result in the
     unshar directory.
           The file specified in unshar-header-file (default "Unshar.Headers")
     in the unshar directory will contain the header and initial text (before
     the shar data) from the article. You can use the `G' {goto-group} command
     to look at the Unshar.Headers file.

:decode	{decode}
     Decode uuencoded articles into binary files. You will be prompted for the
     name of a directory in which you want nn to place the decoded binary
     files (the file names are taken from the uuencoded data).
           nn will combine several articles into single files as needed, and
     you can even decode unrelated packages (into the same directory) with one
     decode command.
           To be able to decode a binary file which spans several articles, nn
     may have to ignore lines which fail the normal sanity checks on uuencoded
     data instead of treating them as transmission errors. Consequently, it is
     strongly recommended to check the resulting decoded file using the
     checksum which is normally contained in the original article. (Actually,
     you are also supposed to do this after decoding with a stand-alone
     uudecode program).
           The header and initial information in the decoded articles are saved
     in the file specified in decode-header-file (default "Decode.Headers") in
     the same directory as the decoded files.
           If decode-skip-prefix is non-null, :decode will attempt to ignore up
     to that many characters on each line to find the encoded data. This is
     particularly useful in some binaries groups where files are both
     uuencoded and packed with shar; nn will ignore the prefix added to each
     line by shar, and thus be able to unshar, concatenate, and decode
     multi-part postings automatically.

In reading mode, the following keys can also be used to invoke the save
commands:

s    Same as S.

o    Same as O.

w    Same as W.

P    Same as :print.

The save commands will prompt for a file name which is expanded according to
the rules described in the section on file name expansion below. For each
group, it is possible to specify a default save file in the init file, either
in connection with the group presentation sequence or in a separate save-files
section (see below). If a default save file is specified for the group, nn
will show this on the prompt line when it prompts for the file name. You can
edit this name as usual, but if you kill the entire name immediately, nn will
replace the default name with the last file name you entered. If you kill this
as well, nn will leave you with a blank line.

If the quick-save variable is set, nn will only prompt for a save file name
when the current article is inside a folder; otherwise, the default save file
defined in the init file will be used unconditionally.

If the file (and directories in the path) does not exist, nn will ask whether
the file (and the directories) should be created.

If the file name contains an asterisk, e.g.
      part*.shar nn will save each of the articles in uniquely named files
constructed by replacing the asterisk by numbers from the sequence 1, 2, 3,
etc. The format of the string that replaces the * can be changed with the
save-counter variable, and the first number to use can be changed via
save-counter-offset.

    In selection mode, nn will prompt you for the identifier of one or more
articles you want to save. When you don't want to save more articles, just hit
space. The saved articles will be marked read.

If you enter an asterisk `*' when you are prompted for an article to save, nn
will automatically save all the selected articles on the current menu page and
mark them read.

Likewise, if you enter a plus `+', nn will save all the selected articles on
all menu pages and mark them read.

This is very useful to unpack an entire package using the :unshar and :decode
commands. It can also be used in combination with the save selected articles
feature to save a selection of articles in separate, successively numbered
files. But do not confuse these two concepts! The S* and S+ commands can be
used to save the selected articles in a single file as well as in separate
files, and the save in separate files feature can be used also when saving
individual articles, either in the selection mode, or in the article reading
mode.

When articles are saved in a file with a full or partial header, any header
lines in the body of the article will be escaped by a tilde (e.g. ~From: ...)
to enable nn to split the folder into separate articles. The escape string can
be redefined via the embedded-header-escape variable.

Articles can optionally be saved in MAIL or MMDF compatible format by setting
the mail-format and mmdf-format variables. These variables only specify the
format used when creating a new folder, while appending to an existing folder
will be done in the format of the folder (unless folder-format-check is
false).

Related variables: confirm-append, confirm-create, decode-header-file,
decode-skip-prefix, default-save-file, folder-save-file, edit-patch-command,
edit-print-command, edit-unshar-command, folder, folder-format-check,
mail-format, mmdf-format, patch-command, printer, quick-save, save-counter,
save-counter-offset, save-report, suggest-default-save, unshar-command,
unshar-header-file.

From: NN
Subject: FOLDER MAINTENANCE

When more than one article is saved in a folder, nn is able to split the
folder, and each article in the folder can be treated like a separate article.

This means that you can save, decode, reply, follow-up, etc. just as with the
original article.

You can also cancel (delete) individual articles in a folder using the normal
C {cancel} command described later. When you quit from the folder, you will
then be given the option to remove the cancelled articles from the folder.

The original folder is saved in a file named `BackupFolder~' in the .nn
directory (see the backup-folder-path variable) by renaming or copying the old
folder as appropriate. When the folder has been compressed, the backup folder
will be removed unless the variable keep-backup-folder is set.

If all articles in a folder are cancelled, the folder will be removed or
truncated to zero length (whatever is allowed by directory and file
permissions). In this case no backup folder is retained even when
keep-backup-folder is set!

If the variable trace-folder-packing is set, nn will show which articles are
kept and which are removed as the folder is rewritten.

Folders are rewritten in the format of the original folder, i.e. the
mail-format and mmdf-format variables are ignored.

Related variables: backup-folder-path, keep-backup-folder,
trace-folder-packing.

From: NN
Subject: FILE NAME EXPANSION

When the save commands prompts for a file name, the following file name
expansions are performed on the file name you enter:

+folder
     The + is replaced by the contents of the folder variable (default value
     "~/News/") resulting in the name of a file in the folder directory.
     Examples:
           +emacs, +nn, +sources/shar/nn

+    A single plus is replaced by the expansion of the file name contained in
     the default-save-file variable (or by folder-save-file when saving from a
     folder).

~/file
     The ~ is replaced by the contents of the environment variable HOME, i.e.
     the path name of your home directory. Examples:
           ~/News/emacs, ~/News/nn, ~/src/shar/nn

~user/file
     The ~user part is replaced by the user's home directory as defined in the
     /etc/passwd file.

|command-line
     Instead of writing to a file, the articles are piped to the given shell
     (/bin/sh) command-line. Each save or write command will create a separate
     pipe, but all articles saved or written in one command (in selection
     mode) are given as input to the same shell command. Example:
           | pr | lp This will print the articles on the printer after they
     have been piped through pr.
           It is possible to create separate pipes for each saved article by
     using a double pipe symbol in the beginning of the command, e.g.
           || cd ~/src/nn ; patch

The following symbols are expanded in a file name or command:

$F   will be expanded to the name of the current group with the periods
     replaced by slashes, e.g. rec/music/synth.

$G   will be expanded to the name of the current group.

$L   will be expanded to the last component of the name of the current group.
     You may use this to create default save file names like +src/$L in the
     comp.sources groups.

$N   will be expanded to the (local) article number, e.g. 1099. In selection
     mode it is only allowed at the end of the file name!

$(VAR)
     is replaced by the string value of the environment variable VAR.

Using these symbols, a simple naming scheme for `default folder name' is +$G
which will use the group name as folder name. Another possibility is +$F/$N.

As mentioned above, you can also instruct nn to save a series of files in
separate, unique files. All that is required is that the file name contains an
asterisk, e.g.
      +src/hype/part*.shar This will cause each of the articles to be saved in
separate, unique files named part1.shar, part2.shar, and so on, always
choosing a part number that results in a unique file name (i.e. if part1.shar
did already exist, the first article would be saved in part2.shar, the next in
part3.shar, and so on).

Related variables: default-save-file, folder, folder-save-file, save-counter,
save-counter-offset.

From: NN
Subject: FILE AND GROUP NAME COMPLETION

When entering a file name or a news group name, a simple completion feature is
available using the space, tab, and ? keys.

Hitting space anywhere during input will complete the current component of the
file name or group name with the first available possibility.

If this possibility is not the one you want, keep on hitting space until it
appears.

When the right completion has appeared, you can just continue typing the file
or group name, or you can hit tab to fix the current component, and get the
first possibility for the next component, and then use space to go through the
other possible completions.

The ? key will produce a list of the possible completions of the current
component. If the list is too long for the available space on screen, the key
can be repeated to get the next part of the list.

The current completion can be deleted with the erase key.

The default value for a file name is the last file name you have entered, so
if you enter a space as the first character after the prompt, the last file
name will be repeated (and you can edit it if you like). In some cases, a
string will already be written for you in the prompt line, and to get the
default value in these cases, use the kill key. This also means that if you
neither want the initial value, nor the default value, you will have to hit
the kill twice to get a clean prompt line.

Related variables: comp1-key, comp2-key, help-key, suggest-default-save.

From: NN
Subject: POSTING AND RESPONDING TO ARTICLES

In both selection mode and reading mode you can post new articles, post
follow-ups to articles, send replies to the author of an article, and you can
send mail to another user with the option of including an article in the
letter. In reading mode, a response is made to the current article, while in
selection mode you will be prompted for an article to respond to.

The following commands are available (the lower-case equivalents are also
available in reading mode):

R	{reply}
     Reply through mail to the author of the article. This is the preferred
     way to respond to an article unless you think your reply is of general
     interest.

F	{follow}
     Follow-up with an article in the same newsgroup (unless an alternative
     group is specified in the article header). The distribution of the
     follow-up is normally the same as the original article, but this can be
     modified via the follow-distribution variable.

M	{mail}
     Mail a letter or forward an article to a single recipient. In selection
     mode, you will be prompted for an article to include in your letter, and
     in reading mode you will be asked if the current article should be
     included in the letter. You will then be prompted for the recipient of
     the letter (default recipient is yourself) and the subject of the letter
     (if an article is included, you may hit space to get the default subject
     which is the subject of the included article).
           The header of the article is only included in the posted letter if
     it is forwarded (i.e. not edited), or if the variable include-full-header
     is set.

:post	{post}
     Post a new article to any newsgroup. This command will prompt you for a
     comma-separated list of newsgroups to post to (you cannot enter a space
     because space is used for group name completion as described below).
           If you enter ? {help-key} as the first key, nn will show you a list
     of all available news groups and their purpose. While paging through this
     list, you can enter q to quit looking at the list. You can also enter /
     followed by a regular expression (typically a single word) which will
     cause nn to show a (much shorter) list containing only the lines matching
     the regular expression.
           Normally, you will be prompted for the distribution of the article
     with the default take from default-distribution, but this can be changed
     via the post-distribution variable.

Generally, nn will construct a file with a suitable header, optionally include
a copy of the article in the file with each non-empty line prefixed by a `>'
character (except in mail mode), and invoke an editor of your choice (using
the EDITOR environment variable) on this file, positioning you on the first
line of the body of the article (if it knows the editor).

    When you have completed editing the message, it will compare it to the
unedited file, and if they are identical (i.e. you did not make any changes to
the file), or it is empty, the operation is cancelled. Otherwise you will be
prompted for an action to take on the constructed article (enter first letter
followed by return, or just return to take the default action):
      a)bort c)c e)dit h)old i)spell m)ail p)ost r)eedit s)end v)iew w)rite
7)bit
      Action: (post article)
You now have the opportunity to perform one of the following actions:

    a    throw the response away (will ask for confirmation),
    c    mail a copy of a follow-up to the poster of the article,
    e    edit the file again,
    h    hold response for later completion,
    i    run an (interactive) spell-checker on the text,
    m    mail a (blind) copy to a specified recipient,
    n    same as abort (no don't post),
    p    post article (same as send),
    r    throw away the edited text and edit the original text,
    s    send the article or letter,
    v    view the article (through the pager),
    w    append it to a file (before you send it),
    y    confirm default answer (e.g. yes post it), or
    7    strip the high-order bit from all characters in the message

If you have selected a 7-bit character set (this is determined by the values
of the charset and data-bits variables), nn will not allow you to post an
article or send a letter whose body contains characters with the high-order
bit set. It will warn you after you have first edited the message and disable
the c)c, m)ail, p)ost, s)end and y)es actions. You can then either e)dit the
message to delete those characters, use 7)bit to strip the high-order bits,
a)bort the message, or h)old it and select an 8-bit character set from nn.

To complete an unfinished response saved by the h)old command, simply enter
any response action, e.g. R {reply}. This will notice the unfinished response
and ask you whether you want to complete it now. Only one unfinished response
can exist at a time. Notice that the $A environment variable may no longer be
valid as a path to the original article when the response is completed.

If your message contains 8-bit characters, the charset variable is not set to
"unknown" and the message does not already have a MIME-Version or Content-XXX
header, nn will add the following headers to your message before sending it:
      MIME-Version: 1.0
      Content-Type: text/plain; charset=charset
      Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
It must be noted that sending 8-bit characters over the current news and mail
networks is risky at best; although large parts of the network will pass
through such characters unchanged, high-order bits may occasionally be
stripped. Although the MIME standard provides solutions for this by encoding
the characters, this is not yet supported by nn. Adding the above headers is
an interim solution that is compatible with current practice and is much
better than just sending the message without any hints about the character set
used.

Related variables: append-signature-mail, append-signature-post, charset,
data-bits, default-distribution, follow-distribution, post-distribution,
edit-response-check, editor, include-art-id, include-full-header,
included-mark, mail-header, mail-record, mail-script, mailer,
mailer-pipe-input, news-header, news-record, news-script,
orig-to-include-mask, pager, query-signature, record, response-check-pause,
response-default-answer, save-counter, save-counter-offset, save-report,
spell-checker.

From: NN
Subject: JUMPING TO OTHER GROUPS

By default nn will present the news groups in a predefined sequence (see the
section on Presentation Sequence later on). To override this sequence and have
a look at any other group the G {goto-group} command available in both
selection and reading mode enables you to move freely between all the
newsgroups.

Furthermore, the G command enables you to open folders and other files, to
read old articles you have read before, and to grep for a specific subject in
a group.

    It is important to notice that normally the goto command is recursive, i.e.
a new menu level is created when the specified group or folder is presented,
and when it has been read, nn will continue the activity in the group that was
presented before the goto command was executed. However, if there are unread
articles in the target group you can avoid entering a new menu level by using
the j reply described below. The current menu level (i.e. number of nested
goto commands) will be shown in the prompt line as "<N>" (in reverse video).

    The goto command is very powerful, but unfortunately also a little bit
tricky at first sight, because the facilities it provides depend on the
context in which the command is used.

    When executed, the goto command will prompt you for the name of the
newsgroup, folder, or file to open. It will use the first letter you enter to
distinguish these three possibilities:

return
     An empty answer is equivalent to the current newsgroup.

letter
     The answer is taken to be the name of a newsgroup. If a news group with
     the given name does not exist, nn will treat the answer as a regular
     expression and locate the first group in the presentation sequence (or
     among all groups) whose name matches the expression.

+   
     The answer is taken to be the name of a folder. If only `+' is entered,
     it is equivalent to the default save file for the current group.

/ or ./ or ~/
     The answer is taken to be the name of a file, either relative to the
     current directory, relative to your home directory, or an absolute path
     name for the file.

%    In reading mode, this reply corresponds to reading the current article
     (and splitting it as a digest). In selection mode, it will prompt for an
     article on the menu to read.

@    This choice is equivalent to the archive file for the current group.
     nnmaster maintains archive files with all old and current articles for
     the groups which have the auto-archive option set in the GROUPS file (see
     nnmaster(8)).

= and number
     These answers are equivalent to the same answers described below applied
     to the current group (e.g. G return = and G = are equivalent).

Specifying a folder, a file, or an article (with %) will cause nn to treat the
file like a digest and split it into separate articles (not physically!) which
are then presented on a menu in the usual way, allowing you to read or save
individual subarticles from the folder.

When you enter a group name, nn will ask you how many articles in the group
you want to see on the menu. You can give the following answers:

a number N
     In this case you will get the newest N articles in the group, or if you
     specified the current group (by hitting return to the group name prompt
     or entering the number directly), you will get that many extra articles
     included on the same menu (without creating a new menu level).

j    This answer can only be given if there are unread articles in the group.
     It will instruct nn to jump directly to the specified group in the
     presentation sequence without creating a new menu level.

u    This instructs nn to present the unread articles in the group (if there
     are any). If you have already read the group (in the current invocation
     of nn), the u answer will instruct nn to present the articles that were
     unread when you entered nn.

a    This instruct nn to present all articles in the group.

sword or =word
     This instructs nn to search all articles in the groups, but only present
     the articles containing the word word in the subject. Notice that case is
     ignored when searching for the word in the subject lines.

nword
     Same as the s form except that it searched for articles where the sender
     name matches word.

eword
     Same as the s form except that it Psearched for articles where either the
     subject or the sender name matches word.

word = /regexp
     When the first character of the word specified with the s, n, and e forms
     is a slash `/', the rest of the input is interpreted as a regular
     expression to search for. Notice that regular expression matching is case
     insensitive when case-fold-search is set (default).

return
     The meaning of an empty answer depends on the context: if there are
     unread articles in the specified group the unread articles will be
     presented, otherwise all articles in the group will be included in the
     menu.

If you specified the current group, and the menu already contains all the
available articles, nn will directly prompt for a word to search for in the
subject of all articles (the prompt will be an equal sign.)

When the goto command creates a new menu level, nn will not perform auto kill
or selection in the group. You can use the + command in menu mode to perform
the auto-selections.

There are three commands in the goto family:

G	{goto-group}
     This is the general goto command described above.

B	{back-group}
     Backup one or more groups. You can hit this key one or more times to go
     back in the groups already presented (including those without new
     articles); when you have found the group you are looking for, hit space
     to enter it.

A	{advance-group}
     Advance one or more groups. This command is similar to the B command, but
     operates in the opposite direction.

N	{next-group}
     When used within an A or B command, it skips forward to the next group in
     the sequence with unread articles or which has previously been visited.

P	{previous}
     When used within an A or B command, it skips backwards to the preceding
     group in the sequence with unread articles or which has previously been
     visited.

Once you have entered an A or Bcommand, you can freely mix the A, B, P, and N
commands to find the group you want, and you can also use the G command to be
prompted for a group name.

To show the use of the goto command some typical examples on its use are given
below:
"Present the unread articles in the dk.general group"
      G dk.general return u
"Jump directly to the gnu.emacs group and continue from there"
      G gnu.emacs return j
"Include the last 10 READ articles in the current group menu"
      G 10 return
"Find all articles in rec.music.misc on the subject Floyd"
      G rec.music.misc return
      = floyd return
"Open the folder +nn"
      G +nn return
"Split current article as a digest (in reading mode)"
      G %

Related variables: case-fold-search, default-save-file, folder-save-file

From: NN
Subject: AUTOMATIC KILL AND SELECTION

When there is a subject or an author which you are either very interested in,
or find completely uninteresting, you can easily instruct nn to auto-select or
auto-kill articles with specific subjects or from specific authors. These
instructions are stored in a kill file, and the most common types of entries
can be created using the following command:

K	{kill-select}
     Create an entry in your personal kill file. The contents of the entry is
     specified during a short dialog that is described in details below. This
     command is available in both selection and reading mode.

Entries in the kill file may apply to a single newsgroup or to all newsgroups.
Furthermore, entries may be permanent or they may be expired a given number of
days after their entry.

To increase performance, nn uses a compiled version of the kill file which is
read in when nn is invoked. The compiled kill file will automatically be
updated if the normal kill file has been modified.

The following dialog is used to build the kill file entry:

AUTO (k)ill or (s)elect (CR => Kill subject 30 days)
     If you simply want nn to kill all articles with the subject of the
     current article (in reading mode) or a specific article (which nn will
     prompt for in selection mode), just hit return. This will cause nn to
     create an entry in the kill file to kill the current (or specified)
     subject in the current group for a period of 30 days (which should be
     enough for the discussion to die out).
     You can control the default kill period, or change it into a "select"
     period via the default-kill-select variable.
     If this "default behaviour" is not what you want, just answer either k or
     s to kill or select articles, respectively, which will bring you on to
     the rest of the questions.

AUTO SELECT on (s)ubject or (n)ame  (s)
     (The SELECT will be substituted with KILL depending on the previous
     answer). Here you specify whether you want the kill or select to depend
     on the subject of the article (s or space), or on the name of the author
     (n).

SELECT NAME:
     (Again SELECT may be substituted with KILL and SUBJECT may replace NAME).
     You must now enter a name (or subject) to select (or kill). In reading
     mode, you may just hit return (or %) to use the name (or subject) of the
     current article. In selection mode, you can use the name (or subject)
     from an article on the menu by answering with % followed by the
     corresponding article identifier.
     When the name or subject is taken from an article (the current or one
     from the menu), nn will only select or kill articles where the name or
     subject matches the original name or subject exactly including case.
     If the first character typed at the prompt is a slash `/', the rest of
     the line is used as a regular expression which is used to match the name
     or subject (case insensitive).
     Otherwise, nn will select or kill articles which contain the specified
     string anywhere in the name or subject (ignoring case).

SELECT in (g)roup `dk.general' or in (a)ll groups  (g)
     You must now specify whether the selection or kill should apply to the
     current group only (g or space) or to all groups (a).

Lifetime of entry in days (p)ermanent  (30)
     You can now specify the lifetime of the entry, either by entering a
     number specifying the number of days the entry should be active, or p to
     specify the entry as a permanent entry. An empty reply is equivalent to
     30 days.

CONFIRM SELECT ....
     Finally, you will be asked to confirm the entry, and you should
     especially note the presence or absence of the word exact which specify
     whether an exact match applies for the entry.

Related variables: default-kill-select, kill.

From: NN
Subject: THE FORMAT OF THE KILL FILE

The kill file consists of one line for each entry. Empty lines and lines
starting with a # character are ignored. nn automatically places a # character
in the first position of expired entries when it compiles the kill file. You
can then edit the kill file manually from time to time to clean out these
entries.

Each line has the following format
      [expire time :] [group name] : flags : string [: string]...

Permanent entries have no expire time (in which case the colon is omitted as
well!). Otherwise, the expire time defines the time (as a time_t value) when
the entry should be expired.

The group name field can have three forms:

news.group.name
     If it is the name of a single news group (e.g. comp.unix), the entry
     applies to that group only.

/regular expression
     If it starts with a slash `/' followed by a regular expression (e.g.
     /^news\..*), the entry applies to all groups whose name are matched by
     the regular expression.

empty
     An empty group field will apply the entry to all groups.

The flags field consists of a list of characters which identifies the type of
entry, and the interpretation of each string field. When used, the flag
characters must be used in the order in which they are described below:

~	(optional)
     When this flag is present on any of the entries for a specific group, it
     causes all entires which are not auto-selected to be killed. This is a
     simple way to say: I'm interested in this and that, but nothing else.

+	or ! (optional)
     Specify an auto-select + or an auto-kill ! entry, respectively. If
     neither are used, the article is neither selected nor killed which is
     useful in combination with the `~' flag.

> (optional)
     When used with a subject (flag s), the kill entry only matches follow-ups
     to that subject (i.e. where the Subject: line starts with Re:). For
     example, to kill all "Re:"'s in rec.humor use the following kill entry:
     rec.humor:!>s/:.

< (optional)
     When used with a subject (flag s), the kill entry only matches base
     articles with that subject (i.e. where the Subject: line does not start
     with Re:). For example, to kill all articles asking for help (but not
     follow-ups) in the tex group, add this to your kill file:
           comp.text.tex:!s</:^HELP

n or s or a (mandatory)
     Specify whether the corresponding string applies to the name n or to the
     subject s of an article. If flag a is used, the corresponding string is
     ignored (but must be present), and the entry applies to articles with a
     non-empty References: line.

/ (optional)
     Specifies that the corresponding string is a regular expression which the
     sender or subject is matched against. If not specified, a simple string
     match is performed using the given string.

= (optional)
     Specifies that the match against the name or subject is case sensitive.
     Furthermore, when regular expression matching is not used, the name or
     subject must be of the same length of the string to match. Otherwise, the
     match will be case insensitive, and a string may occur anywhere in the
     name or subject to match.

| or & (mandatory if multiple strings)
     If more than one string is specified, the set of flags corresponding to
     each string must be separated by either an or operator `|' or an and
     operator `&'. The and operator has a higher precedence than the or
     operator, e.g. a complex match expression a|b&c|d will succeed if either
     of a, b&c, or d matches.

The string field in the entry is the name, subject or regular expression that
will be matched against the name or subject of each article in the group (or
all groups). Colons and backslashes must be escaped with a backslash in the
string.

Example 1: Auto-select articles from `Tom Collins' (exact) on subject `News'
in all groups:
      :+n=&s:Tom Collins:News
Example 2: Kill all articles which are neither from `Tom' or `Eve' in
some.group. Select only articles from Eve:
      some.group:~n:Tom
      some.group:+n:Eve
The second example can also be written as a single entry with an or operator
(in this case, the select/kill attribute only applies to the succeeding
strings):
      some.group:~n|+n:Tom:Eve

To remove expired entries, to "undo" a K command, and to make the more
advanced entries with more than one string, you will have to edit the kill
file manually. To recompile the file, you can use the :compile command. When
you invoke nn, it will also recompile the kill file if the compiled version is
out of dat.

From: NN
Subject: SHELL ESCAPES

The ! commands available in selection and reading mode are identical in
operation (with one exception). When you enter the shell escape command, you
will be prompted for a shell command. This command will be fed to the shell
specified in the shell variable (default loaded from the SHELL environment
variable or /bin/sh) after the following substitutions have been performed on
the command:

File name expansion
     The earlier described file name expansions will be performed on all
     arguments.

$G   will be substituted with the name of the current news group.

$L   will be substituted with the last component of the name of the current
     news group.

$F   will be substituted with the name of the current news group with the
     periods replaced by slashes.

$N   will be substituted with the (local) article number (only defined in
     reading mode).

$A   is replaced by the full path name of the file containing the current
     article (only defined in reading mode).

%    Same as $A.

$(VAR)
     is replaced by the string value of the environment variable VAR.

When the shell command is completed, you will be asked to hit any key to
continue. If you hit the ! key again, you will be prompted for a new shell
command. Any other key will redraw the screen and return you to the mode you
came from.

Related variables: shell, shell-restrictions.

From: NN
Subject: MISCELLANEOUS COMMANDS

Below are more useful commands which are available in both selection and
reading modes.

U	{unsub}
     Unsubscribe to the current group. You will not see this group any more
     unless you explicitly request it. If the variable unsubscribe-mark-read
     is set, all articles in the group will be marked read when you
     unsubscribe.
           If the variable keep-unsubscribed is not set, the group will be
     removed from .newsrc. If you are not subscribing to the group, you will
     be given the possibility to resubscribe to the group! This may be used in
     connection with the G command to resubscribe a group.

C	{cancel}
     Cancel (delete) an article in the current group or folder. Cancelling
     articles in a folder will cause the folder to be rewritten when it is
     closed. In selection mode, you will be prompted for the identifier of the
     article to cancel. Normal users can only cancel their own articles. See
     also the section on folder maintenance.

Y	{overview}
     Provide an overview of the groups with unread articles.

"	{layout}
     Change menu layout in selection mode. The menu will be redrawn using the
     next layout (cycling through ..., 2, 3, 4, 0, 1, ...)

Most of the commands in nn are bound to a key and can be activated by a single
keystroke. However, there are a few commands that cannot be bound to a key
directly.

As shown in the keystroke command descriptions, all commands have a name, and
it is possible to activate a command by name with the extended command key
(:). Hitting this key will prompt you for the name of a command (and
parameters). For example, an alternative to hitting the R key to reply to an
article is to enter the extended command :reply followed by return. The :post
and :unshar commands described earlier can also be bound to a key. The
complete list of commands which can be bound to keys is provided in the
section on Key Mappings below.

The following extended commands cannot be bound to a key, mainly because they
require additional parameters on the prompt line, or because it should not be
possible to activate them too easily.

:admin
     Enter administrative mode. This is identical in operation to the nnadmin
     (1M) program.

:bug Prepare and send a bug report to the nn-bugs mailing address.

:cd [ directory ]
     Change current working directory. If the directory argument is not
     provided, nn will prompt for it.

:clear
     Clear the screen (without redraw). This may be useful at the beginning of
     the init file (possibly guarded by "on program nn"), or in some macros.

:compile
     Recompile the kill file. This is not necessary under normal operation
     since nn automatically compiles the file on start-up if it has changed,
     but it can be used if you modify the kill file while nn is suspended.

:coredump
     Abort with a core dump. For debugging purposes only.

:define macro
     Define macro number macro as described in the Macro Definition section
     below. If macro is omitted, the next free macro number will be chosen.

:dump table
     Same as the :show command described below.

:help [ subject ]
     Provide online help on the specified subject. If you omit the subject, a
     list of the available topics will be given.

:load [ file ]
     Load the specified file. If the file argument is omitted, the init file
     is reloaded. The sequence part (if present) is ignored.

:local variable [ value ]
     Make the variable local to the current group. Subsequent changes to the
     variable will only be effective until the current group is left. If a
     value is specified, it will be assigned to the local variable. To assign
     a new value to a boolean variable, the values on and off must be used.

:lock variable
     Lock the specified variable so it cannot be modified.

:man Call up the online manual. The manual is presented as a normal folder
     with the program name in the `From' field and the section title in the
     `subject' field. All the normal commands related to a folder works for
     the online manual as well, e.g. you can save and print sections of the
     manual.

:map arguments
     This is the command used for binding commands to the keys. It is fully
     described in the Key Mapping section below.

:mkdir [ directory ]
     Create the directory (and the directories in its path). It will prompt
     for at directory name if the argument is omitted.

:motd
     Show the message of the day (maintained by the news administrator in the
     file "motd" in the lib directory. This file is automatically displayed on
     start-up whenever it changes if the motd variable is set.

:pwd Print path name of current working directory on message line.

:q   Has no effect besides redrawing the screen if necessary. If an extended
     command (one which is prefixed by a :) produces any output requirering
     the screen to be redrawn, the screen will not be redrawn immediately if
     the variable delay-redraw is set (useful on slow terminals). Instead
     another : prompt is shown to allow you to enter a new extended command
     immediately. It is sufficient to hit return to redraw the screen, but it
     has been my experience that entering q return in this situation happens
     quite often, so it was made a no-op.

:q!  Quit nn without updating the .newsrc file.

:Q   Quit nn. This is equivalent to the normal Q command.

:rmail
     Open your mailbox (see the mail variable) as a folder to read the
     incoming messages. This is not a full mail interface (depending on the nn
     configuration, you may not be able to delete messages, add cc: on
     replies, etc), but it can give you a quick glance at new mail without
     leaving nn.

:set variable [ value ]
     Set a boolean variable to true or assign the value to a string or integer
     variable. The :set command is described in details in the section on
     VARIABLES.

:sh  Suspend nn, or if that is not possible, spawn an interactive shell.

:show groups mode
     Show the total number or the number of unread articles in the current
     group, depending on mode: all (list the number of unread articles in all
     groups including groups which you have unsubscribed to), total (list the
     total number of articles in all existing groups), sequence (list unread
     groups in presentation sequence order), subscr (list all subscribed
     groups), unsub (list unsubscribed groups only). Any other mode results in
     a listing of the number of unread articles in all subscribed groups
     including those you have suppressed with the `!' symbol in the group
     presentation sequence. To get just the currently unread groups in the
     presentation sequence, use the `Y' {overview} command.

:show kill
     Show the kill entries that applies to the current group and to all
     groups.

:show rc [ group ]
     Show the .newsrc and select file entries for the current or the specified
     group.

:show map [ mode ]
     Show the key bindings in the current or specified mode.

:sort [ mode ]
     Reorder the articles on the menu according to mode or if omitted to the
     default sort-mode. The following sorting modes are available:
     arrival: list articles by local article number which will be the same as
     the order in which they arrived on the system (unless groups are merged),
     subject: articles with identical subjects are grouped and ordered after
     age of the oldest article in the group,
     lexical: subjects in lexicographical order,
     age: articles ordered after posting date only,
     sender: articles ordered after sender's name.

:tk commands
     Call a set of TK commands (nn-tk)

:toggle variable
     Toggle a boolean variable.

:unread [ group ] [ articles ]
     Mark the current (or specified) group as unread. If the articles argument
     is omitted, the number of unread articles in the group will be set to the
     number of unread articles when nn was invoked. Otherwise, the argument
     specifies the number of unread articles.

:unset variable
     Set a boolean variable to false or clear an integer variable.

:x   Quit nn and mark all articles in the current group as read!

Related variables: backup, bug-report-address, delay-redraw,
keep-unsubscribed, unsubscribe-mark-read, mail, pager, sort-mode.

From: NN
Subject: CATCH UP

If you have not read news for some time, there are probably more news than you
can cope with. Using the option -a0 nn will put you into catch-up mode.

The first question you will get is whether to catch up interactively or
automatically. If you instruct nn to catch up automatically, it will simply
mark all articles in all groups as read, thus bringing you completely
up-to-date.

If you choose the interactive mode, nn will locate all groups with unread
articles, and for each group it will prompt you for an action to take on the
group. An action is selected using a single letter followed by return. The
following actions are available:

y    Mark all articles as read in current group.

n    Do not update group (this is the default action if you just hit return).

r    Enter reading mode to read the group.

U    Unsubscribe to the group.

?    Give a list of actions.

q    Quit. When you quit, nn will ask whether the rest of the groups should be
     updated unconditionally or whether they should remain unread.

From: NN
Subject: NNTP

With NOV it is possible to compile nn as a pure NNTP client. The default NNTP
server is defined in /usr/lib/nntp_server, but this can be overridden by
setting the NNTPSERVER environment variable or by using the -R command option.
If the NNTP server is set to the local host or doesn't exist reading is done
using local files.

    If NNTP is being used over a slow line it is possible to speed up
initialisation by setting the nn variable new-group-action to less than 3 to
stop the active.times file being read and setting show-purpose-mode to 0 to
stop the newsgroups files being read.

    If even faster startup is required the -A command option will stop nn
reading the active file via NNTP but it will instead use the .newsrc file to
provide a list of newsgroups. This means that the information on the number of
unread articles in each group will not be available.

From: NN
Subject: NN-TK OPTIONS

The value of these options can be set via the \finn-tk\fp options menu entries
in the SETUP menu, these changes are stored in the tk-config file in the users
.nn directory.

    These options have their defaults defined in nn-defaults in the nn lib
directory. This global nn-defaults file entries are overidden by the local
tk-config file.

GENERAL
     .RS .IP default_article_lines The number of lines in an article that are
     displayed by default, this is to speed up the loading of articles .IP
     menu_min The minimum size of the subjects panel on the main window. the
     size when reading article .IP menu_max The maximum size of the subjects
     panel on the main window, the size when selecting aricles .IP
     middle_button_pos Where to place the middle row of buttons on the main
     screen, whether above the selection panel, between the panels or bellow
     the article panel .IP mime_handling Under what circumstances to pass
     articles to EXMH for MIME handling .IP mono_font Whether to display
     aricles in mono space font by default .IP nntp_progress Display progress
     of nntp tranfer ever N lines, 0 means never display it. .IP xterm_path
     Path for executing xterm .RE

GROUP LIST
     .RS .IP group_list_all Display the total number articles in each group
     instead of just the number of unread articles .IP group_list_read Display
     groups with no unread articles in them .IP group_list_unsub Display
     groups that are unsubscribed .IP group_list_width Set the width of group
     list .IP single_main Put the group list into the main menu window instead
     of as a separate window .RE

GROUP CASCADING MENUS
     .RS .IP mk_group_menu Generate the group cascading menus at startup
     instead of when required, this slows down startup .IP group_menu_read
     Include groups with no unread articles in the menus .IP group_menu_unsub
     Include unsubscribed groups in the menus .RE

From: NN
Subject: NN-TK NN-DEFAULTS

The nn-defaults file is in X resource format, it contains the defaults for the
various nn-tk options. It also contains resources setting other aspects of the
interface such as colors, fonts and adjustments to the EXMH interface. The
resources can also be set in the X server.

    The file is installed in the nn lib directory but it can be overridden by a
local nn-defaults file in .nn.

From: NN
Subject: VARIABLES AND OPTIONS

It is possible to control the behaviour of nn through the setting (and
unsetting) of the variables described below. There are several ways of setting
variables:
- Through command line options when nn is invoked.
- Through assignments on the command line when nn is invoked.
- Through global set commands in the init file.
- Through set or local commands executed from entry macros.
- Through the :set extended command when you run nn.
- Through the nn-tk NN Variables menu item which produces a panel for setting
the value of these variables.

There are four types of variables:
- Boolean variables
- Integer variables
- String variables
- Key variables

Boolean variables control a specific function in nn, e.g. whether the current
time is shown in the prompt line. A boolean variable is set to true with the
command
      set variable and it is set to false with either of the following
(equivalent) commands:
      unset variable
      set novariable

You can also toggle the value of a boolean variable using the command:
      toggle variable

For example:
      set time
      unset time
      set notime
      toggle time

Integer variables control an amount e.g. the size of the preview window, or
the maximum number of articles to read in each group. They are set with the
following command:
      set variable value In some cases, not setting an integer value has a
special meaning, for example, not having a minimal preview window or reading
all articles in the groups no matter how many there are. The special meaning
can be re-established by the following command:
      unset variable For example:
      set window 7
      unset limit

String variables may specify directory names, default values for prompts, etc.
They are set using the command
      set variable string Normally, the string value assigned to the variable
value starts at the first non-blank character after the variable name and ends
with the last non-blank character (excluding comments) on the line. To include
leading or trailing blanks, or the comment start symbol, #, in the string they
must be escaped using a backslash `\', e.g. to set included-mark to the string
" # ", the following assignment can be used:
      set included-mark \\ \#\\ \ \ # blank-#-blank
To include a backslash in the string, it must be duplicated `\\'. A backslash
may also be used to include the following special characters in the string:
\a=alarm, \b=backspace, \e=escape, \f=form-feed, \n=new-line, \r=return,
\t=tab.

Key variables control the keys used to control special functions during user
input such as line editing and completion. They are set using the command
      set variable key-name

A variable can be locked which makes further modification of the variable
impossible:
      lock variable This can be used in the setup init file which is loaded
unconditionally to enforce local conventions or restrictions. For example, to
fix the included-mark variable to the string ">", the following commands can
be placed in the setup file:
      set included-mark >
      lock included-mark

The current variable settings can be shown with the :set command:

:set (without arguments)
     This will give a listing of the variables which have been set in either
     the init file or interactively.

:set all
     This will give a listing of all variables. Modified variables will be
     marked with a `*' and local variables will be marked with a `>'. A locked
     variable is marked with a `!'.

:set /regexp
     This will give a listing of all variables whose name matches the given
     regular expression.

:set partial-name space
     The space (comp1-key) key will complete the variable name as usual, but
     as a side effect it will display the variable's current value in the
     message line.

Variables are global by default, but a local instantiation of the variable can
be created using the :local command. The local variable will overlay the
global variable as long as the current group is active, i.e. the global
variable will be used again when you exit the current group. The initial value
of the local variable will be the same as the global variable, unless a new
value is specified in the :local command:
      :local variable [ value ]

The following variables are available:

also-full-digest	(boolean, default false)
     When a digest is split, the digest itself is not normally included on the
     menu, and as such the initial adminstrative information is not available.
     Setting also-full-digest will cause the (unsplit) digest to be included
     on the menu. These articles are marked with a @ at the beginning of the
     subject.

also-subgroups	(boolean, default true)
     When set, a group name in the presentation sequence will also cause all
     the subgroups of the group to be included, for example, comp.unix will
     also include comp.unix.questions, etc. When also-subgroups is not set,
     subgroups are only included if the group name is followed by a `.' in
     which case the main group is not included, i.e. `comp.unix' is not
     included when `comp.unix.' is specified in the presentation sequence, and
     vice-versa. Following a group name by an asterisk `*', e.g. comp.unix*,
     will include the group as well as all subgroups independently of the
     setting of also-subgroups.

append-signature-mail	(boolean, default false)
     When false, it is assumed that the .signature file is automatically
     appended to responses sent via E-mail. If true, .signature will be
     appended to the letter (see query-signature).

append-signature-post	(boolean, default false)
     When false, it is assumed that the .signature file is automatically
     appended to posted articles. If true, .signature will explicitly be
     appended to posted articles (see query-signature).

attributes symbols	(string, default ....)
     Each element in this string represents a symbol used to represent an
     article attribute when displayed on the screen. See the section on
     Marking Articles and Attributes.

auto-junk-seen	(boolean, default true)
     When set, articles which have the seen attribute (,) will be marked read
     when the current group is left. If not set, these articles will still be
     either unread or marked seen the next time the group is entered (see also
     confirm-junk-seen and retain-seen-status).

auto-preview-mode		(boolean, default false)
     Enables Auto Preview Mode. In this mode, selecting an article on the menu
     using its article id (letter a-z) will enter preview mode on that article
     immediately. Furthermore, the `n' {next-article} command will preview the
     next article on the menu only if it has the same subject as the current
     article; otherwise, it will return to the menu with the cursor placed on
     the next article. The continue command at the end of the article and the
     `=' {goto-menu} returns to the menu immediately as usual.

auto-read-mode-limit N	(integer, default 0)
     When operating in auto reading mode, nn will auto-select all unread
     articles in the group, skip the article selection phase, and enter
     reading mode directly after entry to the group.
           Auto reading mode is disabled when auto-read-mode-limit is zero; it
     is activated unconditionally if the value is negative, and conditionally
     if the value is greater than zero and the number of unread articles in
     the current group does not exceed the given value.

auto-select-closed mode	(integer, default 1)
     Normally, selecting a closed subject (usually in consolidated menu mode)
     will select (or deselect) all unread articles with the given subject (or
     all articles if they are all read). This behaviour can be changed via the
     value of this variable as follows: 0: select only the first article with
     the subject (shown on menu). 1: select only the unread articles with the
     subject. 2: select all available articles with the subject.

auto-select-rw	(boolean, default false)
     If set, a subject of an article read or posted is automatically used for
     subsequent auto-selecting (if not already selected). This is the most
     efficient way to see your own posts automatically.

auto-select-subject	(boolean, default false)
     When set, selecting an article from the menu using the article id (a-z),
     all articles on the menu with the same subject will automatically be
     selected as well.

backup	(boolean, default true)
     When set, a copy of the initial .newsrc and select files will save be the
     first time they are changed. nn remembers the initial contents of these
     files internally, so the backup variable can be set any time if not set
     on start-up.

backup-folder-path file	(string, default "BackupFolder~")
     When removing deleted articles from a folder, this variable defines the
     name of the file where a (temporary) copy of the original folder is
     saved. If the file name doesn't contain a `/', the file will be located
     in the .nn directory. Otherwise the file name is used directly as the
     relative or full path name of the backup file. If possible, the old
     folder will be renamed to the backup folder name; otherwise the old
     folder is copied to the backup folder.

backup-suffix suffix	(string, default ".bak")
     The suffix appended to file names to make the corresponding backup file
     name (see backup).

bug-report-address address	(string, default nn-bugs@dkuug.dk)
     The mail address to which bug reports created with the :bug command are
     sent.

case-fold-search		(boolean, default true)
     When set, string and regular expression matching will be case
     independent. This is related to all commands matching on names or
     subjects, except in connection with auto-kill and auto-select where the
     individual kill file entries specifies this property.

charset charset	(string, default "us-ascii")
     The character set in use on your terminal. Legal values are "us-ascii",
     "iso-8859-X", where X is a nonzero digit, and "unknown". Setting this
     variable also sets the data-bits variable to the default bit width of the
     character set (7 for "us-ascii" and "unknown", 8 for the "iso-8859-X"
     sets).
     The value of this variable also determines wether nn allows 8-bit
     characters in the body of articles being posted and letters being mailed
     (unless the value is "unknown", in which case this is determined by the
     value of the data-bits variable). If necessary, nn will add extra headers
     to the message indicating its the character set.

check-db-update-time H	(integer, default 12)
     When non-zero, nn will issue a warning if the database has not been
     updated in the last H hours. The warning will tell you whether no news
     has arrived (feed broken?), or whether it is just nnmaster which has not
     updated the database (dead?).

check-group-access	(boolean, default false)
     When set, nn will perform a check on the readability of a group's
     readability before showing the menu for that group. Normally, this is not
     necessary since all users traditionally have access to all news groups.
     Setting (and locking) this variable may be used to limit access to a news
     group via the permissions and ownership of the group's spool directory
     (this will only work for non-NNTP sites).

collapse-subject offset	(integer, default 25)
     When set (non-negative), subject lines which are too long to be presented
     in full on the menus will be "collapsed" by removing a sufficient number
     of characters from the subject starting at the given offset in the
     subject. This is useful in source groups where the "Part (01/10)" string
     sometimes disappears from the menu. When not set (or negative), the
     subjects are truncated.

columns col	(integer, default screen width)
     This variable contains the screen width i.e. character positions per
     line.

comp1-key key	(key, default space)
     The key which gives the first/next completion, and the default value when
     nn is prompting for a string, e.g. a file name.

comp2-key key	(key, default tab)
     The key which ends the current completion and gives the first completion
     for the next component when nn is prompting for a string, e.g. a file
     name.

compress		(boolean, default false)
     This variable controls whether text compression (see the compress
     command) is turned on or off when an article is shown. The compression is
     still toggled for the current article with the compress command key.

confirm-append		(boolean, default false)
     When set, nn will ask for confirmation before appending an article to an
     existing file (see also confirm-create).

confirm-auto-quit		(boolean, default false)
     When set, nn will ask for confirmation before quitting after having read
     the last group. If not confirmed, nn will recycle the presentation
     sequence looking for groups that were skipped with the `N' {next-group}
     command. But it will not look for new articles arrived since the
     invocation of nn.

confirm-create		(boolean, default true)
     When set, nn will ask for confirmation before creating a new file or
     directory when saving or unpacking an article (see also confirm-append).

confirm-entry		(boolean, default false)
     When set, nn will ask for confirmation before entering a group with more
     than confirm-entry-limit unread articles (on the first menu level). It is
     useful on slow terminals if you don't want to wait until nn has drawn the
     first menu to be able to skip the group.
           Answering no to the "Enter?" prompt will cause nn to skip to the
     next group without marking the current group as read. If you answer by
     hitting interrupt, nn will ask the question "Mark as read?" which allows
     you to mark the current group as read before going to the next group. If
     this second question is also answered by hitting interrupt, nn will quit
     immediately.

confirm-entry-limit articles	(integer, default 0)
     Specifies the minimum number of unread articles in a group for which the
     confirm-entry functionality is activated.

confirm-junk-seen		(boolean, default false)
     When set, nn will require confirmation before marking seen articles as
     read when auto-junk-seen is set.

confirm-messages		(boolean, default false)
     In some cases, nn will sleep one second (or more) when it has shown a
     message to the user, e.g. in connection with macro debugging. Setting
     confirm-messages will cause nn to wait for you to confirm all messages by
     hitting any key. (It will show the symbol <> to indicate that it is
     awaiting confirmation.)

consolidated-manual	(boolean, default false)
     When set, the online manual will be presented with one menu line for each
     program in the nn package.

consolidated-menu		(boolean, default false)
     When set, nn will automatically close all multi-article subjects on entry
     to a group, so that each subject only occur once on the menu page.

counter-delim-left	(string, default "[")
     The delimiter string output to the left of the article counter in a
     closed subject's menu line.

counter-delim-right	(string, default "] ")
     The delimiter string output to the right of the article counter in a
     closed subject's menu line.

counter-padding pad		(integer, default 5)
     On a consolidated menu, the subjects may not be very well aligned because
     the added [...] counters have varying length. To (partially) remedy this,
     all counters (and subjects without counters) are prefixed by up to pad
     spaces to get better alignment. Increasing it further may yield
     practially perfect alignment at the cost of less space for the subject
     itself.

cross-filter-seq		(boolean, default true)
     When set, cross posted articles will be presented in the first possible
     group, i.e. according to the current presentation sequence (cross-post
     filtering on sequence). The article is automatically marked read in the
     other cross posted groups unless you unsubscribe to the first group in
     which it was shown before reading the other groups. Likewise, it is
     sufficient to leave the article unread in the first group to keep it for
     later handling.
           If not set, cross-postings are shown in the first group occurring on
     the Newsgroups: line which the user subscribes to (i.e. you let the
     poster decide which group is most appropriate to read his posting).

cross-post		(boolean, default false)
     Normally, nn will only show cross-posted articles in the first subscribed
     group on the Newsgroups: line. When cross-post is set, nn will show
     cross-posted articles in all subscribed groups to which they are posted.

data-bits bits	(integer, default 7)
     When set to 7, nn will display characters with the 8th bit set using a
     meta-notation M-7bit-char. If set to 8, these characters are sent
     directly to the screen (unless monitor is set). Setting the charset
     variable also sets this variable to the default bit width of character
     set.
     It also controls whether keyboard input is 7 or 8 bits, and thus whether
     key maps contain 127 or 255 entries. See the key mapping section for more
     details.
     If the charset has value "unknown", the value of data-bits also
     determines wether nn allows 8-bit characters in the body of articles
     being posted and letters being mailed (this is normally determined
     directly by the charset variable).

date		(boolean, default true)
     If set nn will show the article posting date when articles are read.

debug mask	(integer, default 0)
     Look in the source if you are going to use this.

decode-header-file file	(string, default "Decode.Headers")
     The name of the file in which the header and initial text of articles
     decoded with the :decode command is saved. Unless the file name starts
     with a `/', the file will be created in the same directory as the decoded
     files. The information is not saved if this variable is not set.

decode-skip-prefix N	(integer, default 2)
     When non-null, the :decode command will automatically skip upto N
     characters at the beginning of each line to find valid uuencoded data.
     This allows nn to automatically decode (multi-part) postings which are
     both uuencoded and packed with shar.

default-distribution distr	(string, default "world")
     The distribution to use as the default suggestion when posting articles
     using the follow and post commands if the corresponding
     follow-distribution or post-distribution variable contains the default
     option.

default-kill-select [1]days	(number, default 30)
     Specifies the default action for the K {kill-select} command if the first
     prompt is answered by return. It contains the number of days to keep the
     kill or select entry in the kill file (1-99 days). If it has the value
     days+100 (e.g. 130), it denotes that the default action is to select
     rather than kill on the subject for the specified period.

default-save-file file	(string, default +$F)
     The default save file used when saving articles in news groups where no
     save file has been specified in the init file (either in a save-files
     section or in the presentation sequence). It can also be specified using
     the abbreviation "+" as the file name when prompted for a file name even
     in groups with their own save file.

delay-redraw		(boolean, default false)
     Normally, nn will redraw the screen after extended commands (:cmd) that
     clear the screen. When delay-redraw is set nn will prompt for another
     extended command instead of redrawing the screen (hit return to redraw).

dont-read-active		(boolean, default false)
     Don't read the active file at startup, instead use the active file for
     the list of groups. Can be usefull for slow NNTP connections.

echo-prefix-key		(boolean, default true)
     When true, hitting a prefix key (see the section on key mapping below)
     will cause the prefix key to be echoed in the message line to indicate
     that another key is expected.

edit-patch-command	(boolean, default true)
     When true, the :patch command will show the current patch-command and
     give you a chance to edit it before applying it to the articles.

edit-print-command	(boolean, default true)
     When true, the print command will show the current printer command and
     give you a chance to edit it before printing the articles. Otherwise the
     articles are just printed using the current printer command.

edit-response-check	(boolean, default true)
     When editing a response to an article, it normally does not have any
     meaning to send the initial file prepared by nn unaltered, since it is
     either empty or only contains included material. When this variable is
     set, exiting the editor without having changed the file will
     automatically abort the response action without confirmation.

edit-unshar-command	(boolean, default false)
     When true, the :unshar command will show the current unshar-command and
     give you a chance to edit it before applying it to the articles.

editor command	(string, default not set)
     When set, it will override the current EDITOR environment variable when
     editing responses and new articles.

embedded-header-escape string	(string, default '~')
     When saving an article to a file, header lines embedded in the body of
     the article are escaped using this string to make it possible for nn to
     split the folder correctly afterwards. Header lines are not escaped if
     this variable is not set.

enter-last-read-mode mode	(integer, default 1)
     Normally, nn will remember which group is active when you quit, and offer
     to jump directly to this group when you start nn the next time. This
     variable is used to control this behaviour. The following mode values are
     recognized: 0: Ignore the remembered group (r.g.). 1: Enter r.g. if the
     group is unread (with user confirmation) 2: Enter r.g. or first unread
     group after it in the sequence (w/conf). 3: Enter r.g. if the group is
     unread (no confirmation) 4: Enter r.g. or first unread group after it in
     the sequence (no conf).

entry-report-limit articles	(integer, default 300)
     Normally, nn will just move the cursor to the upper left corner of the
     screen while it is reading articles from the database on entry to a
     group. For large groups this may take more than a fraction of a second,
     and nn can then report what it is doing. If it must read more articles
     than the number specified by this variable, nn will report which group
     and how many articles it is reading.

erase-key key	(key, default tty erase key)
     The key which erases the last input character when nn is prompting for a
     string, e.g. a file name.

expert		(boolean, default false)
     If set nn will use slightly shorter prompts (e.g. not tell you that ?
     will give you help), and be a bit less verbose in a few other cases (e.g.
     not remind you that posted articles are not available instantly).

expired-message-delay pause	(integer, default 1)
     If a selected article is found to have been expired, nn will normally
     give a message about this and sleep for a number of seconds specified by
     this variable. Setting this variable to zero will still make nn give the
     message without sleeping afterwards. Setting it to -1 will cause the
     message not to be shown at all.

flow-control	(boolean, default true)
     When set, nn will turn on xon/xoff flow-control before writing large
     amounts of text to the screen. This should guard against lossage of
     output, but in some network configurations it has had the opposite
     effect, losing several lines of the output. This variable is always true
     on systems with CBREAK capabilities which can do single character reads
     without disabling flow control.

flush-typeahead	(boolean, default false)
     When true, nn will flush typeahead prior to reading commands from the
     keyboard. It will not flush typeahead while reading parameters for a
     command, e.g. file names etc.

folder directory	(string, default ~/News)
     The full pathname of the folder directory which will replace the + in
     folder names. It will be initialized from the FOLDER environment variable
     if it is not set in the init file.

folder-format-check	(boolean, default true)
     When saving an article with a full or partial header in an existing
     folder, nn will check the format of the folder to be able to append the
     article in the proper format. If this variable is not set, folders are
     assumed to be in the format specified via the mmdf-format and mail-format
     variables, and articles are saved in that format without checking.
     Otherwise, the *-format variables are only used to determine the format
     for new folders.

folder-save-file file	(string, default not set)
     The default save file used when saving articles from a folder.

follow-distribution words	(string, default see below)
     This variable controls how the Distribution: header is constructed for a
     follow-up to an original article. Its value is a list of words selected
     from the following list:
     [ [ always ] same ] [ ask ] [ default | distribution ]
     This is interpreted in two steps:
     - First the default distribution is determined. If same is specified and
     the original article has a Distribution: header, that header is used.
     Else if default is specified (or distribution is omitted), the value of
     default-distribution is used. And finally, if only a distribution (any
     word) is specified that is used as the default.
     - Then if ask is specified, the user will be asked to confirm the default
     distribution or provide another distribution. However, if always (and
     same) is specified, and the default was taken from the original article's
     distribution, the original distribution is used without confirmation.
     The default value of follow-distribution is always same default, i.e. use
     either the original distribution or the default-distribution without
     confirmation in either case.

from-line-parsing strictness	(integer, default 2)
     Specifies how strict nn must parse a "From " line in a folder to
     recognize it as a mail format message separator line. The following
     strictness values determine whether a line starting with "From " will be
     recognized as a separator line:
           0: Always.
           1: Line must have at least 8 fields.
           2: Line must contain a valid date and time (ctime style).

fsort		(boolean, default true)
     When set, folders are sorted alphabetically according to the subject (and
     age). Otherwise, the articles in a folder will be presented in the
     sequence in which they were saved.

guard-double-slash	(boolean, default false)
     Normally, when entering a file name, entering two slashes `//' in a row
     (or following a slash by a plus `/+') will cause nn to erase the entire
     line and replace it with the `/' (or `+'). On some systems, two slashes
     are used in network file names, and on those systems guard-double-slash
     can be set; that will cause nn to require three slashes in a row to clear
     the input.

header-lines list	(string, no default)
     When set, it determines the list of header fields that are shown when an
     article is read instead of the normal one line header showing the author
     and subject. See the full description in the section on Customized
     Article Headers below.

help-key key	(key, default ?)
     The key which ends the current completion and gives a list of possible
     completions for the next component when nn is prompting for a string,
     e.g. a file name.

ignore-re		(boolean, default false)
     If set, articles with subjects already seen in a previous invocation of
     nn or another newsreader - and not auto-selected - are automatically
     killed. A great way to read even less news!

ignore-xon-xoff		(boolean, default false)
     Normally, nn will ignore ^S and ^Q in the input from the terminal (if
     they are not handled in the tty driver). Setting this variable will treat
     these characters as normal input.

include-art-id		(boolean, default false)
     The first line in a response with included material normally reads
     "...somebody... writes:" without a reference to the specific article from
     which the quotation was taken (this is found in the References: line).
     When this variable is set, the line will also include the article id of
     the referenced article: "In ...article... ... writes:".

include-full-header	(boolean, default false)
     When set, the mail (M) command will always include the full header of the
     original article. If it is not set, it only includes the header when the
     article is forwarded without being edited.

include-mark-blank-lines	(boolean, default false)
     When set, the included-mark is placed on blank lines in included
     articles. Otherwise, blank lines are left blank (to make it easy to
     delete whole paragraphs with `d}' in vi and `C-@ M-] C-W' in emacs).

included-mark string	(string, default ">")
     This string is prefixed to all lines in the original article that are
     included in a reply or a follow-up. (Now you have the possibility to
     change it, but please don't. Lines with a mixture of prefixes like
           : orig-> <> } ] #- etc.
     are very difficult to comprehend. Let's all use the standard folks! (And
     hack inews if it is the 50% rule that bothers you.)

inews shell-command	(string, default "INEWS_PATH -h")
     The program which is invoked by nn to deliver an article to the news
     transport. The program will be given a complete article including a
     header containing the newsgroups to which the article is to be posted.
     See also inews-pipe-input. It is not used when cancelling an article!

inews-pipe-input		(boolean, default true)
     When set, the article to be posted will be piped into the inews program.
     Otherwise, the file containing the article will be given as the first
     (and only) argument to the inews command.

initial-newsrc-file file	(string, default '.defaultnewsrc')
     Defines the name of a file which is used as the initial .newsrc file for
     new users. The name may be a full path name, or as the default a file
     name which will be looked for in a number of places: in the standard news
     lib directory (where it can be shared with other news readers), in nn's
     lib directory, and in the database directory. Groups which are not
     present in the initial .newsrc file will be automatically unsubscribed
     provided new-group-action is set to a value allowing unsubscribed groups
     to be omitted from .newsrc.

keep-backup-folder	(boolean, default false)
     When set, the backup folder (see backup-folder-path) created when
     removing deleted articles from a folder is not removed. Notice that a
     backup folder is not created if all articles are removed from a folder!

keep-unsubscribed		(boolean, default true)
     When set, unsubscribed groups are kept in .newsrc. If not set, nn will
     automatically remove all unsubscribed from .newsrc if tidy-newsrc is set.
     See also unsubscribe-mark-read.

kill		(boolean, default true)
     If set, nn performs automatic kill and selection based on the kill file.

kill-debug		(boolean, default false)
     When set, nn will display a trace of the auto-kill/select process on
     entry to a group. It is automatically turned off if `q' is entered as the
     answer to a "hit any key" prompt during the debug output.

kill-key key	(key, default tty kill key)
     The key which deletes the current line when nn is prompting for a string,
     e.g. a file name.

kill-reference-count N	(integer, default 0)
     When this variable is non-zero, all articles which have N or more
     references on the References: line (corresponding to the number of >>'s
     on the menu line) will be auto-killed if they are not auto-selected (or
     preserved) via an entry in the kill file. It should probably not be used
     globally for all groups, but can be set on a per-group via the entry
     macros.

layout number	(integer, default 1)
     Set the menu layout. The argument must be a number between 0 and 4.

limit max-articles	(integer, default infinite)
     Limit the maximum number of articles presented in each group to
     max-articles. The default is to present all unread articles no matter how
     many there are. Setting this variable, only the most recent max-articles
     articles will be presented, but all the articles will still be marked as
     read. This is useful to get up-to-date quickly if you have not read news
     for a longer period.

lines lin	(integer, default screen height)
     This variable contains the screen height i.e. number of lines.

long-menu		(boolean, default false)
     If set nn will not put an empty line after the header line and an empty
     line before the prompt line; this gives you two extra menu lines.

macro-debug	(boolean, default false)
     If set nn will trace the execution of all macros. Prior to the execution
     of each command or operation in a macro, it will show the name of the
     command or the input string or key stroke at the bottom of the screen.

mail file	(string, default not set)
     file must be a full path name of a file. If defined, nn will check for
     arrival of new mail every minute or so by looking at the specified file.

mail-alias-expander program	(string, default not set)
     When set, aliases used in mail responses may be expanded by the specified
     program. The program will be given the completed response in a file as
     its only argument, and the aliases should be expanded directly in this
     file (of course the program may use temporary files and other means to
     expand the aliases as long the the result is stored in the provided
     file).
     Notice: currently there are no alias expanders delivered with nn.
     Warning: Errors in the expansion process may lead to the response not
     being sent.

mail-format	(boolean, default false)
     When set, nn will save articles in a format that is compatible with
     normal mail folders. Unless folder-format-check is false, it is only used
     to specify the format used when new folders are created. This variable is
     ignored if mmdf-format is set.

mail-header headers	(string, default not set)
     The headers string specifies one or more extra header lines (separated by
     semi-colons `;') which are added to the header of mail sent from nn using
     the reply and mail commands. For example:
           set mail-header Reply-To: storm@texas.dk;Organization: TI - DK To
     include a semicolon `;' in a header, precede it by a backslash (which
     must be doubled because of the conventions for entering strings).

mail-record file	(string, default not set)
     file must be a full path name of a file. If defined, all replies and mail
     will be saved in this file in standard mailbox format, i.e. you can use
     you favourite mailer (and nn) to look at the file.

mail-script file	(string, default not set)
     When set, nn will use the specified file instead of the standard aux
     script when executing the reply and mail commands.

mailer shell-command	(string, default REC_MAIL)
     The program which is invoked by nn to deliver a message to the mail
     transport. The program will be given a complete mail message including a
     header containing the recipient's address. See also mailer-pipe-input.

mailer-pipe-input		(boolean, default true)
     When set, the message to be sent will be piped into the mailer program.
     Otherwise, the file containing the message will be given as the first
     (and only) argument to the mailer command.

marked-by-next-group N	(integer, default 0)
     Specifies the amount of (unmarked) articles on the menu marked seen by
     the N {next-group} command in selection mode. See marked-by-read-skip for
     possible values of N.

marked-by-read-return N	(integer, default 0)
     Specifies the amount of (unmarked) articles on the menu marked seen by
     the Z {read-return} command in selection mode. See marked-by-read-skip
     for possible values of N.

marked-by-read-skip N	(integer, default 4)
     Specifies the amount of (unmarked) articles on the menu marked seen by
     the X {read-skip} command in selection mode. The following values of N
     are recognized:
           0: No articles are marked seen
           1: Current page is marked seen
           2: Previous pages are marked seen
           3: Previous and current pages are marked seen
           4: All pages are marked seen

mark-overlap	(boolean, default false)
     When set, nn will draw a line (using the underline capabilities of the
     terminal if possible) to indicate the end of the overlap (see the overlap
     variable).

mark-overlap-shading	(boolean, default false)
     When set, nn will shade overlapping lines (see the overlap variable)
     using the attributes defined by the shading-on and shading-off variables
     (of if not set, with the underline attribute). This is typically used to
     give overlapping lines a different colour on terminals which have this
     capability.

menu-spacing mode	(integer, default 0)
     When mode is a non-zero number as described below, nn will add blank
     lines between the lines on the menu to increase readability at the cost
     of presenting fewer articles on each page. The following values of mode
     are recognized: 0: Don't add blank lines between menu lines. 1: Add a
     blank line between articles with different subjects. 2: Add a blank line
     between all articles.

merge-report-rate rate	(integer, default 1)
     When nn is invoked with the -m option (directly or via nngrap), a status
     report of the merging process is displayed and updated on the screen
     every rate seconds. The report contains the time used so far and an
     estimate of the time needed to complete the merge.

message-history N	(integer, default 15)
     Specifies the maximum number, N, of older messages which can be recalled
     with the ^P {message} command.

min-window size	(integer, default 7)
     When the window variable is not set, nn will clear the screen to preview
     an article if there are less than size unused lines at the bottom of the
     menu screen.

mmdf-format	(boolean, default false)
     When set, nn will save articles in MMDF format. Unless
     folder-format-check is false, it is only used to specify the format used
     when new folders are created.

monitor		(boolean, default false)
     When set, nn will show all characters in the received messages using a
     "cat -v" like format. Otherwise, only the printable characters are shown
     (default).

motd		(boolean, default true)
     When set, nn will display the message of the day on start-up if it has
     changed since it was last shown. The message is taken from the file
     "motd" in the lib directory. It can also be shown (again) using the :motd
     command.

multi-key-guard-time timeout	(integer, default 2)
     When reading a multi-key sequence from the keyboard, nn will expect the
     characters constituting the multi-key to arrive "quickly" after each
     other. When a partial multi-key sequence is read, nn will wait (at least)
     timeout tenths of a second for each of the following characters to arrive
     to complete the multi-key sequence. If the multi-key sequence is not
     completed within this period, nn will read the partial multi-key sequence
     as individual characters instead. This way it is still possible to use
     for example the ESC key on a terminal with vt100 like arrow keys. When nn
     is used via an rlogin connection, you may have to increase the timeout to
     get reliable recognition of multi-keys.

new-group-action action	(integer, default 3)
     This variable controls how new groups are treated by nn. It is an integer
     variable, and the following values can be used. Some of these actions
     (marked with an *) will only work when keep-unsubscribed is set, since
     the presence of a group in .newsrc is the only way to recognize it as an
     old group. If options 0, 1 or 2 are chosen the file active.times is not
     read.
     0) Ignore groups which are not in .newsrc. This will obviously include
     new groups.
     1*) Groups not in .newsrc are considered to be new, and are inserted at
     the beginning of the .newsrc file.
     2*) Groups not in .newsrc are considered to be new, and are appended to
     the end of the .newsrc file.
     3) New groups are recognized via a time-stamp saved in the file .nn/LAST
     and in the database, i.e. it is not dependent on the groups currently in
     .newsrc. The new groups are automatically appended to .newsrc with
     subscription. Old groups not present in .newsrc will be considered to be
     unsubscribed.
     4) As 3, but the user is asked to confirm that the new group should be
     appended to .newsrc. If rejected, the group will not be appended to
     .newsrc, and thus be regarded as unsubscribed.
     5) As 4, except that the information is stored in a format compatible
     with the rn news reader (.rnlast). This needs to be tested!

new-style-read-prompt	(boolean, default true)
     When set, the reading mode prompt line includes the group name and the
     number of selected articles in the group.

news-header headers	(string, default not set)
     The headers string specifies one or more extra header lines (separated by
     semi-colons `;') which are added to the header of articles posted from nn
     using the follow and post commands. See mail-header for an example.

news-record file	(string, default not set)
     Save file for follow-ups and postings. Same rules and format as the
     mail-record variable.

news-script file	(string, default not set)
     When set, nn will use the specified file instead of the standard aux
     script when executing the follow and post commands.

newsrc file (string, default "~/.newsrc") Specifies the
     file used by nn to register which groups and articles have been read. The
     default setting corresponds to the .newsrc file used by other news
     readers. Notice that nn release 6.4 onwards does allow individual
     articles to be marked unread, and some articles marked unread, and thus
     no longer messes up .newsrc for other news readers!

nntp-cache-dir directory	(string, default "~/.nn")
     When NNTP is used, nn needs to store articles temporarily on disk. This
     variable specifies which directory nn will use to hold these files. The
     default value may be changed during configuration. This variable can only
     be set in the init file.

nntp-cache-size size	(integer, default 10, maximum 10)
     Specifies the number of temporary files in the nntp cache. The default
     and maximum values may be changed during configuration.

nntp-debug	(boolean, default false)
     When set, a trace of the nntp related traffic is displayed in the message
     line on the screen.

old [max-articles]	(integer, default not set)
     When old is set, nn will present (or scan) all (or the last max-articles)
     unread as well as read articles. While old is set, nn will never mark any
     unread articles as read.

orig-to-include-mask N	(integer, default 3)
     When replying to an article, nn will include some of the header lines
     which may be used to construct a proper mail address for the poster of
     the original article. These addresses are placed on Orig-To: lines in the
     reply header and will automatically be removed before the letter is sent.
     This variable specifies which headers from the article are included; its
     value N is the sum of the following values:
           1: Reply-To:
           2: From:
           4: Path:

overlap lines	(integer, default 2)
     Specifies the number of overlapping lines from one page to the next when
     paging through an article in reading mode. The last line from the
     previous page will be underlined if the terminal has that capability.

pager shell-command		(string, default $PAGER)
     This is the pager used by the :admin command (and nnadmin) when it
     executes certain commands, e.g. grepping in the Log file.

patch-command shell-command	(string, default "patch -p0")
     This is the command which is invoked by the :patch command.

post-distribution words	(string, default see below)
     This variable controls how the Distribution: header is constructed when
     posting an original article. Its value is a list of words selected from
     the following list:
     [ ask ] [ default | distribution ]
     This is interpreted in two steps:
     - First the default distribution is determined. If default is specified
     (or distribution is omitted), the value of default-distribution is used.
     Otherwise, the specified distribution (any word) is used as the default.
     - Then if ask is specified, the user will be asked to confirm the default
     distribution or provide another distribution.
     The default value of post-distribution is ask default, i.e. use the
     default-distribution with confirmation from the user.

preview-continuation cond	(integer, default 12)
     This variable determines on what terms the following article should be
     automatically shown when previewing an article, and the next-article
     command is used, or continue is used at the end of the article. The
     following values can be used:
     0 - never show the next article (return to the menu).
     1 - always show the next article (use 'q' to return to the menu).
     2 - show the next article if it has the same subject as the current
     article, else return to the menu.
     The value should be the sum of two values: one for the action after using
     continue on the last page of the article, and one for the action
     performed when the next-article command is used multiplied by 10.

preview-mark-read		(boolean, default true)
     When set, previewing an article will mark the article as read.

previous-also-read	(boolean, default true)
     When set, going back to the previously read group with P {previous} will
     include articles read in the current invocation of nn even if there are
     still unread articles in the group.

print-header-lines fields	(string, default "FDGS")
     Specifies the list of header fields that are output when an article is
     printed via the :print command and print-header-type is 1 (short header).
     The fields specification is desctribed in the section on Customized
     Article Headers below.

print-header-type N	(integer, default 1)
     Specifies what kind of header is printed by the :print command,
     corresponding to the three save-* commands: 0 prints only the article
     body (no header), 1 prints a short header, and 2 prints the full article
     header.

printer shell-command	(string, default is system dep.)
     This is the default value for the print command. It should include an
     option which prevents the spooler from echoing a job-id or similar to the
     terminal to avoid problems with screen handling (e.g. lp -s on System V).

query-signature		(boolean, default ...)
     Will cause nn to require confirmation before appending the .signature
     file to out-going mail or news if the corresponding append-sig-...
     variable is set.

quick-count	(boolean, default true)
     When set, calculating the total number of unread articles at start-up is
     done by simple subtracting the first unread article number from the total
     number of articles in each group. This is very fast, and fairly accurate
     but it may be a bit too large. If not set, each line in .newsrc will be
     interpreted to count every unread article, thus giving a very accurate
     number. This variable is also used by nncheck.

quick-save	(boolean, default false)
     When set, nn will not prompt for a file name when an article is saved
     (unless it belongs to a folder). Instead it uses the save file specified
     for the current group in the init file or the default save file.

re-layout N		(integer, default 0)
     Normally on the menu, nn will prefix the subject a number of `>'s
     corresponding to the number of references on the References: line. The
     re-layout variable may be set to use a different prefix on the subjects:
           0: One `>' per reference is shown (default).
           1: A single `>' is shown if the Subject contains Re:.
           2: The number of references is shown as `n>'
           3: A single Re: is shown.
           4: If any references use layout 0, else layout 1.

re-layout-read N	(integer, default -1)
     When the header-lines variable is not set, or contains the "*" field
     specifier, a line similar to the menu line will be used as the header of
     the article in reading mode, including the sender's name and the
     article's subject. When this variable is negative, the subject on this
     header line will be prefixed according to the re-layout variable.
     Otherwise, it will define the format of the "Re:" prefix to be used
     instead of the re-layout used on the menu.

read-return-next-page	(boolean, default false)
     When set, the Z {read-return} command will return to the next menu page
     rather than the current menu page.

record file	(string, no default)
     Setting this pseudo variable will set both the mail-record and the
     news-record variables to the specified pathname.

repeat		(boolean, default false)
     When set, nn will not eliminate duplicated subject lines on menus (I
     cannot imagine why anyone should want that, but....)

repeat-group-query	(boolean, default false)
     When set, invoking nn with the -g option will always repeat the query for
     a group to enter until you quit explicitly. (Same as setting the -r
     option permanently).

report-cost		(boolean, default true)
     This variable is ignored unless nn is running with accounting enabled
     (see nnacct). When set, nn will report the cost of the current session
     and the total on exit.

response-check-pause pause	(integer, default 2)
     Specifies the number of seconds to wait after posting an article to see
     whether the action *might* have failed. Some commands run in the
     background and may thus not have completed during this period, so even
     when nn says "Article posted", it may still fail (in which case you are
     informed via mail).

response-default-answer action	(string, default "send")
     The default action to be taken when hitting return to the "response
     action" prompt (abort, edit, send, view, write). If it is unset, no
     default action is defined.

retain-seen-status	(boolean, default false)
     Normally, seen articles will just be unread the next time the group is
     entered (unless they were marked read by auto-junk-seen). If
     retain-seen-status is set, the seen attribute on the articles will
     survive to the next time the group is entered. (This is not recommended
     because it may result in very large select files).

retry-on-error times	(integer, default 0)
     When set, nn will try the specified number of times to open an article
     before reporting that the article does not exist any more. This may be
     necessary in some network environments.

save-closed-mode mode	(integer, default 13)
     When saving an article in selection mode (i.e. by selecting it from the
     menu), nn will simply save the specified article if the article's subject
     is open. When the selected menu entry is a closed subject, the
     save-closed-mode variable determines how many articles among the closed
     articles should be saved: 0: save root article (the one on the menu) only
     1: save selected articles within subject 2: save unread (excl selected)
     articles within subject 3: save selected+unread articles within subject
     4: save all articles within subject If `10' is added to the above values,
     nn will not save the selected subject immediately; instead it will ask
     which articles to save using the above value as the default answer.

save-counter format	(string, default "%d")
     This is the printf-format which nn uses to create substitution string for
     the trailing * in save file names. You can set this to more complex
     formats if you like, but be sure that it will produce different strings
     for different numbers. An alternative format which seems to be popular is
     ".%02d" .

save-counter-offset N	(integer, default 0)
     Normally, file names created with the part.* form will substitute the *
     with successive numbers starting from one. Setting this variable will
     cause these numbers to start from N+1.

save-header-lines fields	(string, default "FDNS")
     Specifies the list of header fields that are saved when an article is
     saved via the O {save-short} command. The fields specification is
     desctribed in the section on Customized Article Headers below.

save-report	(boolean, default true)
     When set, a message reporting the number of lines written is shown after
     saving an article. Since messages are shown for a few seconds, this may
     slow down the saving of many articles (e.g. using the S* command).

scroll-clear-page		(boolean, default true)
     Determines whether nn clears the screen before showing each new page of
     an article.

scroll-last-lines N		(integer, default 0)
     Normally, nn will show each new page of an article from the top of the
     screen (with proper marking of the overlap). When this variable is set to
     a negative value, nn will scroll the text of the new pages from the
     bottom of the screen instead. If it is set to a positive value, nn will
     show pages from the top as usual, but switch to scrolling when there are
     less than the specified number of lines left in the article.

select-leave-next		(boolean, default false)
     When set, you will be asked whether to select articles with the
     leave-next attribute on entry to a group with left over articles.

select-on-sender		(boolean, default false)
     Specifies whether the find (=) command in article selection mode will
     match on the subject or the sender.

shading-on code...	(control string, default not set)
     Specifies the escape code to be sent to the terminal to cause "shading"
     of the following output to the screen. This is used if the
     mark-overlap-shading is set, and by the `+' attribute in the header-lines
     variable.

shading-off code...	(control string, default not set)
     Specifies the escape code to be sent to the terminal to turn off the
     shading defined by shading-on. Shading will typically be done by changing
     the foreground colour to change, e.g.
           on term ti924-colour
           set shading-on ^[ [ 3 2 m
           set shading-off ^[ [ 3 7 m
           set mark-overlap-shading
           unset mark-overlap
           end

shell program	(string, default $SHELL)
     The shell program used to execute shell escapes.

shell-restrictions	(boolean, default false)
     When set (in the init file), nn will not allow the user to invoke the
     shell in any way, including saving on pipes. It also prevents the user
     from changing certain variables containing commands.

show-purpose-mode N		(integer, default 1)
     Normally, nn will show the purpose of a group the first time it is read,
     provided a purpose is known. Setting this variable, this behaviour can be
     changed as follows:
           0: Never show the purpose.
           1: Show the purpose for new groups only.
           2: Show the purpose for all groups.

silent		(boolean, default false)
     When set, nn wont print the logo or "No News" if there are no unread
     articles. Only useful to set in the init file or with the -Q option.

slow-mode		(boolean, default false)
     When set, nn will cut down on the screen output to give better response
     time at low speed. Normally, nn will use standout mode (if possible) to
     mark selected articles on the menu, but when slow-mode is set, nn will
     just put an asterisk `*' next to the article identifier on selected
     articles. Also when slow-mode is set nn will avoid redrawing the screen
     in the following cases: After a goto-group command an empty menu is shown
     (hit space to make it appear), and after responding to an article, only
     the prompt line is shown (use ^L to redraw the screen). To avoid
     redrawing the screen after an extended command, set the delay-redraw
     variable as well.

slow-speed speed	(integer, default 1200)
     If the terminal is running at this baud rate or lower, the on slow (see
     the section on init files) condition will be true, and the on fast will
     be false (and vice-versa).

sort		(boolean, default true)
     When set, nn will sort articles according to the current sort-mode on
     entry to a group. Otherwise, articles will be presented in order of
     arrival. If not set on entry to a menu for merged groups, the articles
     from each group will be kept together on the menu. If sort is unset while
     merged groups are presented on the menu, the articles will be reordered
     by local article number (which may not keep articles from the same group
     together).

sort-mode mode	(integer, default 1)
     The default sort algorithm used to sort the articles on entry to a news
     group. It is a numeric value corresponding to one of the sorting methods
     described in connection with the :sort command:
           0 - arrival (ordered by article number)
           1 - subject (subjects ordered after age of first article)
           2 - lexical (subjects in lexicographical order)
           3 - age (articles ordered after posting date only)
           4 - sender (articles ordered after sender's name)

spell-checker shell-command	(string, default not set)
     When set, responses can be checked for spelling mistakes via the (i)spell
     action. The command to perform the spelling is given the file containing
     the full article including header as its only argument. If the spell
     checker can fix spelling mistakes, it must apply the changes directly to
     this file.

split		(boolean, default true)
     When set, digests will automatically and silently be split into
     sub-articles which are then handled transparently as normal articles.
     Otherwise, digests are presented as one article (which you can split on
     demand with the G command).

stop lines	(integer, default not set)
     When stop is set, nn will only show the first lines lines of the of each
     article before prompting you to continue. This is useful on slow
     terminals and modem lines to be able to see the first few lines of longer
     articles (and skipping the rest with the n command).

subject-match-limit length	(integer, default 256)
     Subjects will be considered identical if their first length characters
     match. Setting this uncritically to a low value may cause unexpected
     results!

subject-match-offset offset	(integer, default 0)
     When set to a positive number, that many characters at the beginning of
     the subject will be ignored when comparing subjects for ordering and
     equality purposes.

subject-match-parts	(boolean, default false)
     When set, two subjects will be considered equal if they are identical up
     to the first (differing) digit. Together with the subject-match-offset
     variable, this can be used in source groups where the subject often has a
     format like:
           vXXXXXX: Name of the package (Part 01/04)
     Setting subject-match-offset to 8 and subject-match-parts to true will
     make nn consider all four parts of the package having the same subject
     (and thus be selectable with `*').
     Notice that changing the subject-match-... variables manually will not
     have an immediate effect. To reorder the menu, an explicit :sort command
     must be performed. These variables are mainly intended to be set using
     the :local command in on entry macros for source and binary groups (entry
     macros are evaluated before the menu is collected and sorted).

subject-match-minimum characters	(integer, default 4)
     When set to a positive number, that many characters at the beginning of
     the subject must match before the subject-match-parts option comes into
     affect. This is important, because the part matching causes the rest of
     the line to be ignored after the first digit pair is discovered. This
     begins after any subject-match-offset has been applied.

suggest-default-save	(boolean, default true)
     When set, nn will present the default-save-file when prompting for a save
     file name in a group without a specific save file, or folder-save-file
     when saving from a folder. When not set, no file name is presented, and
     to use the default save file, a single + must be specified.

tidy-newsrc		(boolean, default false)
     When set, nn will automatically remove lines from .newsrc which represent
     groups not found in the active file or unsubscribed groups if
     keep-unsubscribed is not set.

time		(boolean, default true)
     When set, nn will show the current time in the prompt line. This is
     useful on systems without a sysline (1) utility.

trace-folder-packing	(boolean, default true)
     When set, a trace of the retained and deleted messages is printed when a
     folder is rewritten.

trusted-escape-codes codes	(string, default none)
     When set to a list of one or more characters, nn will trust and output
     escape characters in an article if it is followed by one of the
     characters in the list. For example, to switch to or from kanji mode,
     control codes like "esc\ $" and "esc\ (\ J" may be present in the text.
     To allow these codes, use the following command:
           set trusted-escape-codes ($
     You can also set it to all to pass all espace codes through to the
     screen. Notice that nn thinks all characters (including esc) output to
     the screen as occupy one column.

unshar-command shell-command	(string, default "/bin/sh")
     This is the command which is invoked by the unshar command.

unshar-header-file file	(string, default "Unshar.Headers")
     The name of the file in which the header and initial text of articles
     unpacked with the :unshar command is saved. Unless the file name starts
     with a `/', the file will be created in the same directory as the
     unpacked files. The information is not saved if this variable is not set.
     Setting it to "Unshar.Result" will cause the headers and the results from
     the unpacking process to be merged in a meaningful way (unless
     mmdf-format is set).

unsubscribe-mark-read	(boolean, default true)
     When set, unsubscribing to a group will automatically mark all current
     articles read; this is recommended to keep the size of .newsrc down.
     Otherwise, unread articles in the unsubscribe groups are kept in .newsrc.
     If keep-unsubscribed is false, this variable has no effect.

update-frequency		(integer, default 1)
     Specifies how many changes need to be done to the .newsrc or select files
     before they are written back to disk. The default setting causes .newsrc
     to be updated every time a group has been read.

use-path-in-from		(boolean, default false)
     When mail-format is set, saved articles will be preceded by a specially
     formatted "From\ " line:
           From origin date Normally, the origin will be the name of the news
     group where the article appeared, but if use-path-in-from is set, the
     contents of the "Path:" header will be used as the origin.

use-selections		(boolean, default true)
     When set, nn uses the selections and other article attributes saved last
     time nn was used. If not set, nn ignores the select file.

visible-bell	(boolean, default true)
     When set, nn will flash the screen instead of "ringing the bell" if the
     visible bell (flash) capability is defined in the termcap/terminfo
     database.

window size	(integer, default not set)
     When set, nn will reserve the last size lines of the menu screen for a
     preview window. If not set, nn will clear the screen to preview an
     article if there are less than min-window lines at the bottom of the
     screen. As a side effect, it can also be used to reduce the size of the
     menus, which may be useful on slow terminals.

word-key key	(key, default ^W)
     The key which erases the last input component or word when nn is
     prompting for a string, e.g. the last name in a path name.

wrap-header-margin size	(integer, default 6)
     When set (non-negative), the customized header fields specified in
     header-lines will be split across several lines if they don't fit on one
     line. When size is greater than zero, lines will be split at the first
     space occurring in the last size columns of the line. If not set (or
     negative), long header lines will be truncated if they don't fit on a
     single line.

From: NN
Subject: CUSTOMIZED ARTICLE HEADER PRESENTATION

Normally, nn will just print a (high-lighted) single line header containing
the author, subject, and date (optional) of the article when it is read.

By setting the header-lines variable as described below, it is possible to get
a more informative multi line header with optional high-lighting and
underlining.

The header-lines variable is set to a list of header line identifiers, and the
customized headers will then contain exactly these header lines in the
specified order.

The same specifications are also used by the :print and save-short commands
via the print-header-lines and save-header-lines variables.

The following header line identifiers are recognized in the header-lines,
print-header-lines, and save-header-lines variables:

    A    Approved:
    a    Spool-File:(path of spool file containing the article)
    B    Distribution:
    C    Control:
    D    Date:
    E    Content-transfer-encoding:
    d    Date-Received:
    F    From:
    f    Sender:
    G    Newsgroup:(current group)
    g    Newsgroup:(current group if cross-posted or merged)
    I    Message-Id:
    K    Keywords:
    L    Lines:
    M    Mime-Version:
    N    Newsgroups:
    n    Newsgroups:   (but only if cross posted)
    O    Organization:
    P    Path:
    R    Reply-To:
    S    Subject:
    T    Content-Type:
    v    Save-File:(the default save file for this article)
    W    Followup-To:
    X    References:
    x    Back-References:
    Y    Summary:

The 'G' and 'g' fields will include the local article number if it is known,
e.g.
      Newsgroup: news.software.nn/754

The following special symbols are recognized in the header-lines variable (and
ignored otherwise):

Preceding the identifier with an equal sign "=" or an underscore "_" will
cause the header field contents to be high-lighted or underlined.

A plus sign "+" will use the shading attribute defined by shading-on and
shading-off to high-light the field contents. If no shading attribute is
defined it will underline the field instead.

Including an asterisk "*" in the list will produce the standard one line
header at that point.

Example: The following setting of the header-lines variable will show the
author (underlined), organization, posting date, and subject (high-lighted)
when articles are read:
      set header-lines _FOD=S

From: NN
Subject: COMMAND LINE OPTIONS

Some of the command line options have already been described, but below we
provide a complete list of the effect of each option by showing the equivalent
set, unset, or toggle command.

Besides the options described below, you can set any of nn's variables
directly on the command line via an argument of the following format:
      variable=value
To set or unset a boolean variable, the value can be specified as on or off (t
and f will also work).

Notice that the init files are read before the options are parsed (unless you
use the -I option). Therefore, the options which are related to boolean
variables set in the init file will toggle the value set there, rather than
the default value. Consequently, the meaning of the options are also
user-defined.

The explanations below describe the effect related to the default setting of
the variables, with the `reverse' effect in square brackets.

-aN	{set limit N}
     Limit the maximum number of articles presented in each group to N. This
     is useful to get up-to-date quickly if you have not read news for a
     longer period.

-a0  Mark all unread articles as read. See the full explanation at the
     beginning of this manual.

-A   Don't read active file, instead use the .newsrc file for the list of
     groups, this can be useful for slow NNTP connections.

-B	{toggle backup}
     Do not [do] backup the rc file.

-d	{toggle split}
     Do not [do] split digests into separate articles.

-f	{toggle fsort}
     Do not [do] sort folders according to the subject (present the articles
     in a folder in the sequence in which they were saved).

-g   Prompt for the name of a news group or folder to be entered

-i	{toggle case-fold-search}
     Normally searches with -n and -s are case independent. Using this option,
     the case becomes significant.

-I   Do not read the init file. This must be the first option!! The global
     setup file is still read.

-Ifile-list
     Specifies an alternate list of init files to be loaded instead of the
     standard global and private init files. The list is a comma-separated
     list of file names. Names which does not contain a `/' are looked for in
     the ~/.nn directory. An empty element in the list is interpreted as the
     global init file. The list of init files must not be separated from the
     -I option by blanks, and it must be the first option. Example: The
     default behaviour corresponds to using -I,init (first the global file,
     then the file ~/.nn/init). The global setup file is still read as the
     first init file independently of the -I option used.

-k	{toggle kill}
     Do not [do] perform automatic kill and selection of articles.

-lN	{set stop N}
     Stop after printing the first N lines of each article. This is useful on
     slow terminals.

-L[f]	{set layout f}
     Select alternative menu layout f (0 to 4). If f is omitted, menu layout 3
     is selected.

-m	{no corresponding variable}
     Merge all articles into one `meta group' instead of showing them one
     group at a time. When -m is used, no articles will be marked as read.

-nWORD
     Collect only articles which contain the string WORD in the sender's name
     (case is ignored). If WORD starts with a slash `/', the rest of the
     argument is used as a regular expression instead of a fixed string.

-N	{no corresponding variable}
     Disable updating of the rc file. This includes not recording that groups
     have been read or unsubscribed to (although nn will think so until you
     quit).

-q	{toggle sort}
     Do not [do] sort the articles (q means quick, but it isn't any quicker in
     practice!)

-Q	{toggle silent}
     Quiet mode - don't [do] print the logo or "No News" messages.

-r	{toggle repeat-group-query}
     Make -g repeat query for a group to enter.

-R host
     Connect to the specified NNTP server

-sWORD
     Collect only articles which contain the string WORD in their subject
     (case is ignored). If WORD starts with a slash `/', the rest of the
     argument is used as a regular expression instead of a fixed string.

-S	{toggle repeat}
     Do not [do] eliminate duplicated subject lines on menus.

-T	{toggle time}
     Do not [do] show the current time in the prompt line.

-w[N]	{set window N}
     Reserve N lines of the menu screen for a preview window. If N is omitted,
     the preview window is set to 5 lines.

-W	{toggle confirm-messages}
     [Don't] Wait for confirmation on all messages.

-x[N]	{set old N}
     Present (or scan) all (or the last N) unread as well as read articles.
     This will never mark unread articles as read.

-X	{no corresponding variable}
     Read/scan unsubscribed groups also. Most useful when looking for a
     specific subject in all groups, e.g.
           nn -mxX -sSubject all
     

From: NN
Subject: MACRO DEFINITIONS

Practically any combination of commands and key strokes can be defined as a
macro which can be bound to a single key in menu and/or reading mode.

The macro definition must specify a sequence of commands and key strokes as if
they were typed directly from the keyboard. For example, a string specifying a
file name must follow a save command. This manual does not give a complete
specification of all the input required by the various commands; it is
recommended to execute the desired command sequence from the keyboard prior to
defining the macro to get the exact requirements of each command.

Although it is possible to define temporary macros interactively using the
:define command, macro definitions are normally placed in the init file.
Macros are numbered from 0 to 100, i.e. it is possible to define a total of
101 different macros (implicit macros defined with the map command uses
internal numbers from 101 to 200).

To define macro number M, the following construction is used (the line breaks
are mandatory):
      define M
      body
      end

The body consists of a sequence of tokens separated by white space (blanks or
newlines). However, certain tokens continue to the end of the current line.

The following tokens may occur in the macro body:

Comments
     Empty lines and text following a # character (preceded by white space) is
     ignored.

Command Names
     Any command name listed in the key mapping section can be included in a
     macro causing that command to be invoked when the macro is executed.

Extended Commands
     All the extended commands which can be executed through the command
     command (normally bound to the : key) can also be executed in a macro. An
     extended command starts with a colon (:) and continues to the end of the
     current line. Example:
           :show groups total

Key Strokes
     A key stroke (which is normally mapped into a command depending on the
     current mode) is specified as a key name enclosed in single quotes.
     Examples (A-key, left arrow key, RETURN key):
           'A' 'left' '^M'

Shell Commands
     External commands can be invoked as part of a macro execution. There are
     two forms of shell command invocations available depending on whether a
     command may produce output or require user input, or it is guaranteed to
     complete without input or output to the terminal. The difference is that
     in the latter case, nn does not prepare the terminal to be used by
     another program. When the command completes, the screen is not redrawn
     automatically; you should use the redraw command to do that. The tho
     forms are:
           :!echo this command uses the terminal
           :!!echo this command does not > /tmp/file

Strings
     Input to commands prompting for a string, e.g. a file name, can be
     specified in a macro as a double quoted string. Example (save without
     prompting for a file name):
           save-short "+$G"

Conditionals
     Conditionals may occur anywhere in a macro; a conditional is evaluated
     when the macro is executed, and if the condition is false the rest of the
     current line is ignored. The following conditionals are available:
           ?menu True in menu mode
           ?show True in reading mode
           ?folder True when looking at a folder
           ?group True when looking at a news group
           ?yes Query user, true if answer is yes
           ?no Query user, true if answer is no Example (stop macro execution
     if user rejects to continue):
           prompt "continue? " ?no break
     In addition to these conditionals, it is possible to test the current
     value of boolean and integer variables using the following form:
           ?variable=value This conditional will be true (1) if the variable is
     an integer variable whose current value is the one specified, or (2) if
     the variable is a boolean variable which is either on or off. Examples:
           ?layout=3 :set layout 1
           ?monitor=on break
           ?sort=off :sort age

break
     Terminate macro execution completely. This includes nested macros.
     Example (stop if looking at a folder):
           ?folder break

return
     Terminate execution of current macro. If the current macro is called from
     another macro, execution of that macro continues immediately.

input
     Query the user for a key stroke or a string, for example a file name.
     Example (prompt the user for a file name in the usual way):
           save-short input

yes  Confirm unconditionally if a command requires confirmation. It is ignored
     if the command does not require confirmation. Example (confirm creation
     of new files):
           save-short "+$G" yes

no   Terminate execution of current macro if a command requires confirmation;
     otherwise ignore it. If neither yes nor no is specified when a command
     requires confirmation, the user must answer the question as usual - if
     the user confirms the action execution continues normally; otherwise the
     execution of the current macro is terminated. Example (do not create new
     files):
           save-short "+$L/misc" no

prompt string
     Print the string in the prompt line (highlighted). The string must be
     enclosed in double quotes. Example:
           prompt "Enter recipient name" When the macro terminates, the
     original prompt shown on entry to the macro will automatically be
     redrawn. If this is not desirable (e.g. if the macro goes from selection
     to reading mode), the redrawing of the prompt can be disabled by using a
     prompt command with an empty string (""). Example:
           prompt "Enter reading mode?" # old prompt is saved
           ?no return # and old prompt is restored
           read-skip # changes the prompt
           prompt "" # so forget old prompt

echo string
     Display the string in the prompt line for a short period. Example:
           ?show echo "Cannot be used in reading mode" break

puts string-to-end-of-line
     The rest of the line is output directly to the terminal without
     interpretation.

macro M
     Invoke macro number M. The maximum macro nesting level is five (also
     catches macro loops).

I use the following macro to quickly save all the selected files in a file
whose name is entered as usual. It also works in reading mode (saving just the
current article).
      define 1
      :unset save-report
      save-short input yes
      ?menu '+'
      :set save-report
      end

From: NN
Subject: KEY MAPPINGS

The descriptions of the keys and commands provided in this manual reflects the
default key mappings in nn. However, you can easily change these mappings to
match your personal demands, and it is also possible to remap keys depending
on the terminal in use. Permanent remapping of keys must be done through the
init file, while temporary changes (for the duration of the current invocation
of nn) can be made with the :map command.

The binding and mapping of keys are controlled by four tables:

The multikey definition table
     This table is used for mapping multicharacter key sequences into single
     characters. By default the table contains the mappings for the four
     cursor keys, and there is room for 10 user-defined multikeys. The
     fourteen multikeys are named: up, down, right, left (the four arrow keys),
     and #0 through #9 for the user-defined keys.
     Multikey #i (where i is a digit or an arrow key name) is defined using
     the following command:
           map #i key-sequence
     where the sequence is a list of 7-bit character names (see below)
     separated by spaces. For example, if the HOME key sends the sequence ESC
     [ H, you can define multikey #0 to be the home key using the command:
           map #0 ^[ [ H

The input key mapping table
     All characters that are read from the keyboard will be mapped through the
     input mapping table. Consequently, you can globally remap one key to
     produce any other key value. By default all keys are mapped into
     themselves.
     An entry in the input key mapping table to map input-key into new-key is
     made with the command
           map key input-key new-key
     For example, to make your ESC key function as interrupt you can use the
     command
           map key ^[ ^G

The selection mode key binding table
     This table defines for each key which command should be invoked when that
     key is pressed in selection mode, i.e. when the article menu is shown.
     The command to bind a key to a command in selection mode is:
           map menu key command
     For example, to have the HOME key defined as multikey #0 above bound to
     the select command, the following command is used:
           map menu #0 select
     To remap a key to select a specific article on the menu (which the `a'
     through `z' keys do by default), the command must be specified as
     `article N' where N is the entry number on the menu counted from zero
     (i.e. a=0, b=1, ..., z=25, 0=26, ..., 9=35). For example, to map `J' to
     select article `j', the following command is used:
           map menu J article 9

The reading mode key binding table
     This table defines for each key which command should be invoked when that
     key is pressed in reading mode, i.e. when the article text is shown. The
     command to bind a key to a command in reading mode is:
           map show key command

In addition to the direct mappings described above, the following variations
of the map command are available:

User defined keymaps
     Additional keymaps can be defined using the command
           make map newmap
     This will create a new keymap which can initialized using normal map
     commands, e.g.
           map newmap key command
     To activate a user-defined keymap, it must be bound to a prefix key:
           map base-map prefix-key prefix newmap
     When used, the prefix key itself does not activate a command, but instead
     it require another key to be entered and then execute the command bound
     to that key in the keymap which is bound to the prefix key.
           For example, to let the key sequence "^X i" execute macro number 10
     in both modes, the following commands can be used:
           make map ctl-x
           map ctl-x i macro 10
           map both ^X prefix ctl-x

Mapping keys in both modes
     Using the pseudo-keymap `both', it is possible to map a key to a command
     in both selection and reading mode at once. For example, to map the home
     key to macro number 5 in both modes, the following command can be used:
           map both #0 macro 5

Aliasing
     A key can also be mapped directly to the command currently bound to
     another key. Later remapping of the other key will not change the mapping
     of the `aliased' key. This is done using the following command:
           map keymap new-key as old-key

Binding macros to keys
     A previously defined macro can be bound to a key using the command:
           map keymap key macro macro-number

Implicit macro definitions
     An implicit macro can also be defined directly in connection with the map
     command:
           map keymap key (
           body...
           )

Keys and character names are specified using the following notation:

C    A single printable character represents the key or character itself.

^C   This notation represents a control key or character. DEL is written as ^?

125, 0175, 0x7D
     Characters and keys can be specified by their ordinal value in decimal,
     octal, and hexadecimal notation.

up, down, right, left
     These names represent the cursor keys.

#0  through  #9
     These symbols represent the ten user-defined multikeys.

If the variable data-bits is 7, key maps can specify binding of all keys in
the range 0x00 to 0x7F, and the 8th bit will be stripped in all keyboard
input. If the variable data-bits is 8, the 8th bit is not cleared, and key
maps are extended to allow binding of keys in the range 0xA0 to 0xFE
(corresponding to the national characters defined by the ISO 8859 character
sets). Binding commands to these keys can be done either by using their
numeric value, or directly specifying the 8 bit character in the map command,
e.g.
      map menu 0xC8 macro 72
      map key \o'\(aae' %

To show the current contents of the four tables, the following versions of the
:map command are available:

:map Show the current mode's key bindings.

:map menu
     Show the selection mode key bindings.

:map show
     Show the reading mode key bindings.

:map #
     Show the multikey definition table.

:map key
     Show the input key mapping table.

From: NN
Subject: STANDARD KEY BINDINGS

Below is a list of all the commands that can be bound to keys, either in
selection mode, in reading mode, or both. For each command the default command
key bindings in both modes are shown. If the key is not bound in one of the
modes, but it can be bound, the corresponding part will just be empty. If the
command cannot be bound in one of the modes, that mode will contain the word
nix.

    Function              Selection mode  Reading mode
    advance-article       nix             a
    advance-group         A               A
    article N             a-z0-9          nix
    back-article          nix             b
    back-group            B               B
    cancel                C               C
    command               :               :
    compress              nix             c
    continue              space           space
    continue-no-mark      return          nix
    decode
    find                  =               /
    find-next             nix             .
    follow                F               fF
    full-digest           nix             H
    goto-group            G               G
    goto-menu             nix             = Z
    help                  ?               ?
    junk-articles         J               nix
    kill-select           K               K
    layout                "               nix
    leave-article         nix             l
    leave-next            L               L
    line+1                ,  down         return
    line-1                /               nix
    line=@                nix             g
    macro M
    mail                  M               m M
    message               ^P              ^P
    next-article          nix             n
    next-group            N               N
    next-subject          nix             k
    nil
    overview              Y               Y
    page+1                >               nix
    page+1/2              nix             d
    page-1                <               delete  backspace
    page-1/2              nix             u
    page=0                nix             h
    page=1                ^               ^
    page=$                $               $
    patch
    post
    preview               %               %
    previous              P               p
    print                                 P
    quit                  Q               Q
    read-return           Z               nix
    read-skip             X               X
    redraw                ^L ^R           ^L ^R
    reply                 R               r R
    rot13                 nix             D
    save-body             W               w W
    save-full             S               s S
    save-short            O               o O
    select                .               nix
    select-auto           +               nix
    select-invert         @               nix
    select-range          -               nix
    select-subject        *               *
    shell                 !               !
    skip-lines            nix             tab
    unselect-all          ~               nix
    unshar
    unsub                 U               U
    version               V               V

See the descriptions of the default bindings for a description of the
commands. The pseudo command nil is used to unbind a key.

From: NN
Subject: THE INIT FILES

The init files are used to customize nn's behaviour to local conventions and
restrictions and to satisfy each user's personal taste.
Normally, nn reads upto four init files on start-up if they exist (all init
files are optional):

$LIB/setup
     A system-wide file located in the library directory. This file is always
     loaded before any other init file (even when the -I option is specified).
     It cannot contain a group presentation sequence.

$LIB/init
     Another system-wide (global) init file located in the library directory.
     This file may be ignored via the -I option.

~/.nn/init
     The private init file located in the user's .nn directory. It is read
     after the global init file to allow the user to change the default setup.

~/.nn/tk-init-nn
     Another private init file located in the user's .nn directory, this one
     is managed using the nn-tk setup menu and overrides any values set it
     ~/.nn/init. It should be noted that once a value is changed using nn-tk
     it writes the value of all variables that have been changed from their
     builtin defaults to ~/.nn/tk-init-nn, so that all variable changing from
     then on should be done via the nn-tk setup menu.

The init file is parsed one line at a time. If a line ends with a backslash
`\', the backslash is ignored, and the following line is appended to the
current line.

The init file may contain the following types of commands (and data):

Comments
     Empty lines and lines with a # character as the first non-blank character
     are ignored. Except where # has another meaning defined by the command
     syntax (e.g. multi-keys are named #n), trailing comments on input lines
     are ignored.

Variable settings
     You can set (or unset) all the variables described earlier to change nn's
     behaviour permanently. The set and unset commands you can use in the init
     file have exactly the same format as the :set and :unset commands
     described earlier (except that the : prefix is omitted.)
     Variables can also be locked via the lock command; this is typically done
     in the setup file to enforce local policies.

Key mappings
     You can use all the versions of the map command in the init file.

Macro Definitions
     You can define sequences of commands and key strokes using the
     define...end construction, which can then be bound to single keys with
     the map command.

Load terminal specific files
     You can load a terminal specific file using the
           load file
     The character @ in the file will be replaced by the terminal type defined
     in the TERM environment variable. nn silently ignores the load command if
     the file does not exist (so you don't have to have a specific init file
     for terminals which does not require remapping). If the file is not
     specified by an absolute pathname, it must reside in your ~/.nn
     directory. Examples:
           # load local customizations
           load /usr/lib/nninit
           # load personal terminal specific customizations
           load init.@

Switch to loading a different init file
     You can skip the rest of the current init file and start loading a
     different init file with the following command:
           chain file
     If this occur in the private or global init file, the chained init file
     may contain a sequence part which will replace the private or global
     presentation sequence respectively.

Stop loading current init file
     You can skip the rest of the current init file with the following
     command:
           stop

Give error messages and/or terminate
     If an error is detected in the init file, the following commands can be
     used to print an error message and/or terminate execution:
     error fatal error message...
           Print the message and terminate execution.
     echo warning message...
           Print the message and continue.
     exit [ status ]
           Terminate nn with the specified exit status or 0 if omitted.

Change working directory of nn
     You can use the cd command to change the working directory whenever you
     enter nn. Example:
           # Use folder directory as working directory inside nn
           cd ~/News

Command groups
     The init file can contain groups of commands which are executed under
     special conditions. The command groups are described in the section on
     command groups below.

One or more save-files sections
     A save-files section is used to assign default save files to specific
     groups:
           save-files
           group-name (pattern) file-name
           ...
           end
     The group name (patterns) and save file names are specified in the same
     way as in the presentation sequence (see below). Example:
           save-files
           news* +news/$L
           comp.sources* /u/src/$L/
           end

The news group presentation sequence
     The last part of the init file may specify the sequence in which you want
     the news groups to be presented. This part starts with the command
     sequence and continues to the end of the init file.

Both init files may contain a presentation sequence. In this case, the global
sequence is appended to the private sequence.

From: NN
Subject: COMMAND GROUPS

Command groups may only occur in the init file, and they provide a way to have
series of commands executed at certain points during news reading.

In release 6.4 onwards, these possibilities are still rather rudimentary, and
a mixture of normal init file syntax and macro syntax is used depending on
whether the command group is only executed on start-up or several times during
the nn session.

A command group begins with the word on and ends with the word end. The
following command groups are conditionally executed during the parsing of the
init file if the specified condition is true. They may also have an optional
else part which is executed if the condition is false:
      on condition
      commands
      [ else
      commands ]
      end

The following conditional command groups may be used in the init file to be
executed at start-up:

on [ test ]
     The commands (init file syntax) in the group are executed only if the
     specified test is true. A shell is spawned to execute the command "[ test
     ]", so all the options of the test(1) command is available. For example,
     to unset the flow-control variable if the tty is a pseudo-tty, the
     following conditional can be used:
           on [ -n "`tty | grep ttyp`" ]
           unset flow-control
           end

on !shell command
     The command group is executed if the given shell command exits with 0
     status (success). Care should be taken that the command does not produce
     any output, e.g. by redirecting its output to /dev/null. For example, to
     prevent people from reading news if load is above a specific level, the
     following conditional might be placed in the global setup file.
           on !load-above 5
           error load is too high, try again later.
           end

on `shell command\|` string...
     The command group is executed if the first output line from executing the
     specified shell command is listed among the specified string values. The
     shell command can be omitted on subsequent occurrences of this
     conditional, in which case the output from the last shell command is
     used. For example, the following conditional can be used to switch to an
     init file which has a limited sequence for news reading during working
     hours, evenings, and nights:
           on `date +%H` 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
           chain init.work
           end
           on `` 17 18 19 20 21
           chain init.evening
           else
           chain init.night
           end

on `` string...
     This is equivalent to the previous form except that instead of executing
     a shell command, the output from the previous

on $variable [ value ]
     If no value strings are specified, the command group is executed if the
     given variable is defined in the environment. Otherwise, the command
     group is executed only if the value of the variable occur in the value
     list. For example, if you want nn to look for mail in whatever $MAIL is
     set to - if it is set - you can use the following code:
           on $MAIL
           set mail $(MAIL)
           end

on slow
     The commands (init file syntax) in the group are executed only if the
     current terminal output speed is less than or equal to the baud rate set
     in the slow-speed variable. This can be used to optimize the
     user-interface for slow terminals by setting suitable variables:
           on slow
           set confirm-entry
           set slow-mode
           set delay-redraw
           unset visible-bell
           set compress
           unset header-lines
           set stop 5
           set window 10
           end

on fast
     Same as on slow except that the commands are only executed when the
     terminal is running at a speed above the slow-speed value.

on term term-type...
     The commands are executed if one of the term-type names is identical to
     value of the TERM environment variable.

on host host-name...
     The commands are executed if the local host's name occur in the host-name
     list.

on program program-name...
     The commands are executed if the current program (nn, nncheck, etc) in
     the program-name list.

The following on command groups are really macros which may be executed during
nn's normal processing, and as such they cannot have an else part.

on entry [ group list ]
     These commands (macro format!) are executed every time nn enters a news
     group. If a group list is not specified, the commands are associated with
     all groups which don't have its own entry macro specified in the group
     sequence. Otherwise, the entry macro will be associated with the groups
     in the list. The group list is specified using the meta-notations
     described in the presentation sequence section.
     All `:' commands at the beginning of the command group are executed
     before nn collects the articles in the group, so it is possible to set or
     unset variables like cross-post and auto-read-mode before any articles
     are collected and the menu is (not) shown.
           The non-`:' commands, and `:' commands that follows a command of
     another type will be executed immediately after the first menu page is
     presented. The execution of a `:' command can be postponed by using a
     double `::' as the command prefix.
           on entry comp.sources* alt.sources
           :set cross-post on # set before collection
           :local auto-read-mode on # set before showing menu
           ::unset cross-post # set after collection
           end

on start-up
     These `:' commands (macro format!) are executed on start-up just before
     nn enters the first news group. However, postponed commands (i.e. non-`:'
     commands) will not be executed until the first group is shown (it works
     like an entry macro).

From: NN
Subject: GROUP PRESENTATION SEQUENCE

News groups are normally presented in the sequence defined in the system-wide
init file in nn's library directory.

You can personalize the presentation sequence by specifying an alternative
sequence in the private init file. The sequence in the private init file is
used before the global presentation sequence, and need only describe the
deviations from the default presentation sequence.

The presentation sequence must start with the word
      sequence followed by a list of the news group names in the order you want
them to be presented. The group names must be separated by white space. The
sequence list must be the last part of the init file (the parsing of commands
from the init file stops when the word sequence is encountered).

You may use a full group name like "comp.unix.questions", or just the name of
a main group or subgroup, e.g. "comp" or "comp.unix". However, if "comp"
precedes "comp.unix.questions" in the list, this subgroup will be placed in
the normal alphabetic sequence during the collection of all the "comp" groups.

Groups which are not explicitly mentioned in any of the sequence files will be
placed after the mentioned groups, unless `!!' is used and it has not been
disabled (as described below).

Each group name may be followed by a file or folder name (must start with
either of `/' `~' or `+') which will specify the default save file for that
group (and its subgroups). A single `+' following the group name is an
abbreviation for the last save file name used. For example, the following two
sequences are equivalent:
      group1 +file group2 +file group3 +file
      group1 +file group2 + group3 +

When an article is saved, the default save name will be used as the initial
contents of the file name prompt for further editing. It therefore does not
need to be be a complete file name (unless you use the quick save mode).

Each group name may also be associated with a so-called entry action. This is
basically an (unnamed) macro which is invoked on entry to the group (following
the same rules as the `on entry' command group related to :set and :unset
commands).

The entry action begins with a left parenthesis `(' and ends with a right
parenthesis `)' on an otherwise empty line:
      comp.sources. +src/$L/ (
      :set cross-post
      )
The last entry action can be repeated by specifying an empty set of
parenthesis, e.g.
      comp.unix. +unix ()
The entry action of a preceding group in the sequence can be associated with
the current group(s) by specifying the name of the group in the parentheses
instead of the commands, e.g.
      comp.unix. +unix (comp.sources.unix)
A macro can also be associated with the entry action by specifying its number
in the same way as the group name above, e.g.
      rec.music. +music (30)
Notice that it is the current definition of the macro which is associated with
the group, so if the macro is later redefined with the `:define' command, it
will not have any effect on the entry action.

Group names can be specified using the following notations:

group.name
     Append the group (if it exists) to the presentation sequence list. If
     also-subgroups is set (default), all subscribed subgroups of the group
     will be included as well (if there are any). Examples: "comp",
     "comp.unix", "comp.unix.questions". If the group does not exits (e.g.
     "comp"), the subgroups will be included even when also-subgroups is not
     set, i.e. "comp" is equivalent to "comp.".

group.name.
     Append the subgroups of the specified group to the presentation sequence.
     The group itself (if it exists) is not included. Examples: "comp.",
     "comp.unix.".

.group.name
     Append the groups whose name ends with the specified name to the
     sequence. Example: ".test".

group.name*
     Append the group and its subgroups to the presentation sequence list
     (even when also-subgroups is not set). Example: "comp.unix*".

The following meta notation can be used in a sequence file. The group.name can
be specified using any of the forms described above:

! groups
     Completely ignore the group or groups specified unless they are already
     in the presentation sequence (i.e. has been explicitly mentioned earlier
     in the sequence).

!:code groups
     Ignore a selection of groups based on the given code letter (see below),
     unless they are already included in the sequence. Notice that these forms
     only excludes groups from the presentation sequence, i.e. they do not
     include the remaining groups at this point; that must be done explicitly
     elsewhere.

!:U groups
     Ignore unsubscribed groups, i.e. if they are neither new, nor present and
     subscribed in .newsrc. This is useful to ignore a whole hierarchy except
     for a few groups which are explicitly mentioned in .newsrc and still see
     new groups as they are created.

!:X groups
     Ignore unsubscribed and new groups, i.e. if they are not currently
     present and subscribed in .newsrc. This is useful to ignore a whole
     hierarchy except for a few groups which are explicitly mentioned in
     .newsrc. New groups in the hierarchy are ignored unless `NEW' occurs
     earlier in the sequence.

!:O groups
     Ignore old groups, i.e. unless they are new. This is useful to ignore a
     whole hierarchy but still see new groups which are created in the
     hierarchy (it might become interesting some day). Individual groups can
     still be included in the sequence if they are specified before the `!:O'
     entry.

!:N groups
     Ignore new groups in the hierarchy.

!!   Stop building the presentation sequence. This eliminates all groups that
     are not already in the presentation sequence.

NEW  This is a pseudo group name which matches all new groups; you could place
     this symbol early in your presentation sequence to see new groups `out of
     sequence' (to attract your attention to them).

RC   This is a pseudo group name which matches all groups occurring in the
     .newsrc file. It will cause the groups in .newsrc to be appended to the
     presentation sequence in the sequence in which they are listed in
     .newsrc.

RC:number
     Similar to the RC entry, but limited to the first number lines of the
     .newsrc file. Example: RC:10 (use 10 lines of .newsrc).

RC:string
     Similar to the RC entry, but limited to the lines up to (and including)
     the first line (i.e. group) starting with the given string. For example:
     RC:alt.sources

< group.name
     Place the group (and its subgroups) at the beginning of the presentation
     sequence. Notice that each `<' entry will place the group(s) at the
     beginning of the current sequence, i.e. < A < B < C will generate the
     sequence C B A.

> group.name
     Place the group (and its subgroups) after all other groups that are and
     will be entered into the presentation sequence.

@    Disable the `!!' command. This can be included in the personal
     presentation sequence if the global sequence file contains a !! entry
     (see example 1 below).

% .... %
     Starts and ends a region of the sequence where it is possible to include
     groups which has been eliminated earlier. This may be useful to alter the
     sequence of some groups, e.g. to place comp.sources.bugs after all other
     source groups, the following sequence can be used:
     ! comp.sources.bugs comp.sources* % comp.sources.bugs %

Example 1: In a company where ordinary users only should read the local news
groups, and ignore the rest (including new news groups which are otherwise
always subscribed to initially), can use the following global presentation
sequence:
      general
      follow
      ! local.test
      local
      !!
The "expert" users in the company must put the @ command somewhere in their
private sequence to avoid losing news groups which they have not explicitly
mentioned in their init file.
Example 2: This is the global sequence for systems with heavy news addicts who
setup their own sequences anyway.
      # all must read the general news first
      < general
      # test is test, and junk is junk,
      # so it is placed at the very end
      > test
      > .test
      > junk
      # this is the standard sequence which everybody may
      # change to their own liking
      local # our local groups
      dk # the Danish groups
      eunet.general # to present it before eunet.followup
      eunet # the other European groups
      comp # the serious groups
      news # news on news
      sci # other serious groups
      rec # not really that important (don't quote me)
      misc # well, it must be somewhere
      # the groups that are not listed above goes here
Notice the use of comments in the sequence where they are allowed at the end
of non-empty lines as well.
Example 3: My own presentation sequence (in the init file) simply lists my
favourite groups and the corresponding default save files:
      sequence
      !:U alt* # ignore unsubscribed alt groups
      news.software.nn +nn
      comp.sys.ti* +ti/$L
      NEW # show new groups here
      news*
      rec.music.synth +synth/
      comp.emacs*,gnu.emacs +emacs/misc
      comp.risks +risks
      eunet.sources +src/unix/
      comp.sources* +src/$L/
The presentation sequence is not used when nn is called with one or more news
group names on the command line; it is thus possible to read ignored groups
(on explicit request) wihtout changing the init file. (Of course, you can also
use the G command to read ignored groups).

From: NN
Subject: MERGING NEWS GROUPS

The third example above contains the following line:
      comp.emacs*,gnu.emacs +emacs/misc
This is the syntax used to merge groups. When two or more groups are merged,
all new articles in these groups are presented together as if they were one
group. To merge groups, their names must be listed together in the sequence,
and only separated by a single comma. To merge the groups resulting from a
single group pattern (e.g. comp.emacs*), the group pattern must be followed by
a comma and a blank (e.g. comp.emacs*, ...).

Merged groups are presented as the first group in the "list", and the word
"MERGED" will be shown after the group name. The Y {overview} command will
still show merged groups as individual groups, but they will be annotated with
the symbol `&' on the first of the groups, and a `+' on the rest of the
groups.

In the current version, the concept of the current group in connection with
merged groups is a bit fuzzy. This should only be noticeable with the G
command, which will take the most recently used group among the merged groups
as the current group. So things like G = ... may not always work as expected.

From: NN
Subject: ENVIRONMENT

The following environment variables are used by nn:

EDITOR. The editor invoked when editing replies, follow-ups, and composing
mail. nn knows about the following editors: vi, ded, GNU emacs, and
micro-emacs, and will try to position the cursor on the first line following
the header, i.e. after the blank line which must not be deleted! If an article
has been included, the cursor is placed on the first line of the included text
(to allow you to delete sections easily).

LOGNAME. This is taken as the login name of the current user. It is used by nn
to return failed mail. If it is not defined, nn will use the value of USER, or
if that is not defined either, nn will use the call `who am i' to get this
information. If all attempts fail, the failed mail is dropped in the bit
bucket.

PAGER. This is used as the initial value of the pager variable.

SHELL. This is the shell which is spawned if the system cannot suspend nn, and
it will be used to execute the shell escapes.

TERM. The terminal type.

From: NN
Subject: FILES

~/.newsrc             The record of read articles.
~/.nn/select          The record of selected and seen articles.
~/.nn/init            Personal configuration and presentation sequence.
~/.nn/kill            The automatic kills and selections.
~/.nn/KILL.COMP       The compiled kill file.
~/.nn/LAST            The time stamp of the last news group we have seen.
~/.nn/NEXTG           Active group last time nn was quit.
~/.nn/.param          Parameter file for the aux script
$lib/setup            System-wide setup - always read first.
$lib/init             System-wide setup and presentation sequence.
$lib/aux              The response edit and send script.
$lib/routes           Mapping rules for mail addresses (on non-domain systems).
$db/*                 The news data base.
/etc/termcap          Terminal data base [BSD].
/usr/lib/terminfo/*   Terminal data base [SysV].
/usr/lib/nntp-server  Name of remote nntp server.
The name $lib and $db are the directories used for the auxiliary files and the
news data base respectively. Their name and location is defined at compile
time. Common choices are /usr/local/lib/nn or /usr/lib/news/nn for $lib and
/usr/spool/nn or /usr/spool/news/.nn for $db.

From: NN
Subject: SEE ALSO

Other netnews documentation.
RFC 1341, MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions)
nncheck(1), nngoback(1), nngrab(1), nngrep(1), nnpost(1), nntidy(1)
nnadmin(1M), nnusage(1M), nnmaster(8), nnspew(8)

From: NN
Subject: AUTHOR

Kim F. Storm, Texas Instruments A/S, Denmark
E-mail: storm@texas.dk (but see the addresses below)

The NNTP support was designed and implemented by Ren\o'\(aae' Seindal,
Institute of Datalogy, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Bugs and fixes, suggestions, ideas, critique, etc. can be sent to the
following address:
      nn-bugs@dkuug.dk

The news.software.nn group is used for discussion on all subjects related to
the nn news reader. This includes, but is not limited to, questions, answers,
ideas, hints, information from the development group, patches, etc.

From: NNACCT
Subject: - news accounting and access authorization (nn)

nnacct - news accounting and access authorization (nn)


From: NNACCT
Subject: SYNOPSIS

nnacct -r [ -f file ] [ -a ] [ user ]...
nnacct [ -ppolicy ] [ -qquota ] user...
nnacct -ZERO

From: NNACCT
Subject: DESCRIPTION

The nnacct command provides an optional accounting and access authorization
for news reading via the nn news reader.

The first form (-r) is used to print accounting reports. If a file is
specified data from a saved accounting file; otherwise the data is read from
the current accounting file.

If -a is specified, the report will contain accounting data for all users.
Otherwise, if one or more users are specified, the data for these users will
be printed. If neiter is specified, only the accounting data for the current
user is printed.
      Only the super-user can generate reports for other users than the caller.

The second form (-p and/or -q) assigns the specified access policy and/or
quota to the specified users. If a given user is not already known in the
accounting file, a new entry with the specified policy and quota is created
(default values are used if both are not specified).

The third form (-ZERO) will clear the usage counts for all users. Individual
usage counts cannot be cleared. The original accounting file is saved with a
.old suffix.

The following policies are currently implemented:

0    No access. The user is not allowed to read news at all.

1    Privileged user. The user can read news at all times and no accounting
     information is saved. This is obviously the policy for system
     administrators :-)

2    Full time access. The user can access news at all times.

3    Off-hours access. The user can only access news at off hours, i.e. in the
     morning, in the evening, on week-ends, and on holidays (not complete -
     check the source :-)

The quota specifies a number of hours which the user is allowed to read news.
When this quota is used up, access will be blocked. A quota of zero gives
unlimited access.

New users will get the default policy and quota defined in account.c. If this
allows new users to read news at only specific times, this form can be used to
permit individual users to read news at all times, or it can be used to
prevent them from reading news at all. If the default policy does not allow
new users to read news, this form must be used to authorize them to read news.

From: NNACCT
Subject: HOW IT WORKS

If authorization is enabled, the nn news reader will call nnacct on start-up
to check whether the policy and quota defined for the current user allows him
to read news at this time (or at all).

If accounting is enabled, the nn news reader will call nnacct on exit to
register the time spent on news reading. If account logging is also defined
(see account.c), an line is also added to the accounting log file.

When accounting is defined, the user can use the :cost command to get the
current accounting data, and if the variable report-cost is set, nn will print
accounting information on exit.

From: NNACCT
Subject: CONTIGURATION AND NEW POLICIES

The use of nnacct is enabled via the ACCOUNTING and AUTHORIZE symbols in nn's
configuration file. Further configuration of cost calculations, logging,
default policy, default quotas, etc. is done directly in the source file
account.c. New access policies can also be defined in this file. This allows
you to change the policies or prices without having to recompile the whole
package since only nnacct is modified.

From: NNACCT
Subject: PRIVILEGED USERS

Normally, only root is allowed to change user policy or quota, list all user's
accounting data etc. This privilege can be shared with other users by listing
their login name in the file $CLIENT/admins. There should be exactly one login
name per line, and no blanks are allowed.

From: NNACCT
Subject: FILES

$db/acct        accounting data (accumulated per user)
$db/acctlog     accounting log (grows indefinitely)
$lib/admins     login names of privileged nnacct users.


From: NNACCT
Subject: SEE ALSO

nn(1), nnusage(1)

From: NNACCT
Subject: BUGS

There should be some tools to mess around with the accounting files, e.g. to
make summaries, clear usage counters, etc.

From: NNACCT
Subject: AUTHOR

Kim F. Storm, Texas Instruments A/S, Denmark
E-mail: storm@texas.dk

From: NNADMIN
Subject: - nn database administration

nnadmin - nn database administration


From: NNADMIN
Subject: SYNOPSIS

nnadmin [ commands ]

From: NNADMIN
Subject: DESCRIPTION

nnadmin is a control program for the nnmaster(1M) daemon which is responsible
for building and maintaining the database used by the nn(1) news reader.

nnadmin allows you to display extracts from the log file, display the "raw"
contents of the database, make consistency checks on the database, instruct
the running nnmaster to expire one or more groups, alter the options of the
running nnmaster, and much more.

nnadmin runs in two modes: interactive and non-interactive.

In interactive mode, simple one line menus are used to show the available
operations which are then selected by typing the letter associated with the
command (normally the first letter in the command name).

In non-interactive mode, the commands argument will be used as a series of
key-strokes which are interpreted exactly as if they were typed in from the
keyboard in interactive mode. For example, to stop the nnmaster, the following
invokation of nnadmin can be used:
      nnadmin MK
which will select the (M)aster submenu from the main menu, and then the (K)ill
entry from the submenu.

In non-interactive mode, the menus are not displayed and the commands are not
echoed! nnadmin will exit when there are no more key-strokes to be read from
the commands argument. It is not possible to specify a group name in the
commands argument, so the functionalities of nnadmin that relates to specific
groups are only available in interactive mode.

Some "dangerous" commands will require that you confirm them by following them
by "Y" on the command line. The most noteable are IY (initialize database) and
EY (expire all groups). These commands will be marked with a [Y] following the
command name.

You can also invoke an interactive nnadmin using the :admin command in nn.

From: NNADMIN
Subject: SHELL ESCAPES

At all prompts you can hit `!' to spawn a subshell.

The working directory of the subshell will be changed to the database
directory when invoked from the MASTER or DUMP menus, and it will changed to
the group's spool directory (if it exists) when invoked from the GROUP menu.

From: NNADMIN
Subject: MAIN MENU

From the main menu (identified by the ADMIN prompt) you can select the
following operations:

C)onf
     Show current configuration parameters such as directories, files,
     programs, network usage, etc.

E)xpire [Y]
     Send a request to the nnmaster daemon to schedule (and run) expire for
     all groups in the database.

G)roups
     Enter the GROUP submenu.

I)nit [Y]
     Send a request to the nnmaster daemon to recollect all groups in the
     database.

L)og
     Enter the LOG submenu.

M)aster
     Enter the MASTER submenu.

Q)uit
     Quit nnadmin.

S)tat
     Print general statistics about the database. See the section on Database
     Statistics below.

U)pdate
     Update the incore copy of the database master index.

V)alidate
     Make a thorough consistency check on the database. If inconsistencies are
     found in a group, you will be asked whether a request should be sent to
     the nnmaster daemon to recollect the group (in non-interactive mode,
     requests will be sent automatically for all corrupted groups).

W)akeup
     Send a wakeup signal to the nnmaster daemon to have it receive messages
     sent to it, perform the required actions, and then collect articles as
     necessary.

Z (silent validation)
     This operation is identical to the Validate operation, expect that no
     output is produced during the consistency check; this operation is used
     by the nnmaster to execute the -C option.

From: NNADMIN
Subject: THE MASTER MENU

The master menu (identified by the MASTER prompt) provides access to overall
database information, and to send control messages to the nnmaster daemon.

C)heck
     In interactive mode and in verbose batch mode (nnadmin MC), print a
     message telling whether nnmaster is running or not. In silent batch mode
     (nnadmin =MC) exit with a status code of 0 if nnmaster is running and 1
     otherwise; this may be useful is administrative scripts.

D)ump
     Enter the DUMP submenu.

F)iles
     Print a listing (using ls(1)) of all the data and index files in the
     database.

G)roup
     Print the master index entry for a single group identified by its
     internal group number.

K)ill
     Stop the nnmaster when it has finished its current task.

O)ptions
     Change the runtime options of the running nnmaster daemon. Currently,
     only the value of the -r and -e options can be modified.

S)tat
     Print general statistics about the database. See the section on Database
     Statistics below.

T)race
     Turn the trace option -t on or off in the running nnmaster.

From: NNADMIN
Subject: THE DUMP MENU

The dump menu (identified by the DUMP prompt) allows you to print the master
index entry for various selections of groups in the database.

A)ll
     Print all groups in the database.

E)mpty
     Print the empty groups in the database.

H)oles
     Print the groups where the `min' field in the active file is not the
     first article saved in the database (because it doesn't exist or because
     it is ignored for some other reason, e.g. bad or old).

I)gnored
     Print groups which are ignored, either in the GROUPS file or because of
     some other condition (mainly no spool directory).

N)on-empty
     Print the non-empty groups in the database.

V)alid
     Print the groups which are present in the active file.

in(W)alid
     Print the groups in the database which are not present in the active
     file.

From: NNADMIN
Subject: THE LOG MENU

The log menu (identified by the LOG prompt) enables you the extract specific
entries from the log file, and to truncate the log file.

The entries in the log file share the following format:
      <class>: <date> <time> (<user>): <message>
where <class> identifies the message class, the <date> and <time> specify when
the entry was made, the <user> specifies who created the entry (the letter "M"
denote the nnmaster), and the <message> is the text of the entry.

To extract the log file entries of a specific class, simply enter the letter
identifying the class:

A - admin to master communication
     This class of messages are related to the sending of messages from an
     nnadmin program to the nnmaster daemon.

B - bad articles
     Reports about bad articles which have been ignored or removed (controlled
     by the -b and -B options to nnmaster).

C - collection statistics
     Statistics about collection of new articles. The message has the format:
           Collect: nnn art, ppp gr, ttt s
     meaning that nnn articles in ppp groups were collected in ttt seconds
     (real time).

E - fatal errors
     Fatal errors encountered during operation. These errors require manual
     intervention to be fixed (some of the fatal errors occur if thing that
     "cannot happen" happens anyway, and may indicate a bug in the software).

M - nnmaster messages.
     Master start/stop messages.

N - NNTP related messages
     Various messages related to the NNTP part of the nnmaster, mostly about
     lost connections and failed attempts to connect to the NNTP server. These
     messages should only appear if you use NNTP, and your NNTP server is down
     for some reason.

O - old articles
     Reports related to ignoring (and removing) old articles when building the
     database (controlled by the -O and -B options to nnmaster).

R - reports
     Non-fatal error which enables the nnmaster to continue operation, but may
     prevent a user to run nn (file access problems). Reported problems should
     be checked. The most common report message will probably be
           some.group: no directory
     which indicates that the spool directory for that group has disappeared
     (most likely because it has been rmgroup'ed).

T - trace output
     Messages produced as a result of using the -t option on the nnmaster.
     This is primarily for debugging purposes.

U - usage statistics
     If nn is compiled with the STATISTICS option enabled, an entry will be
     made in the log file every time a user has spent more than five minutes
     on news reading. The message will have the following format:
           USAGE hours.minutes
     Since it is possible to suspend nn, or leave the terminal while nn is
     active, nn tries to be intelligent when it calculates the usage time so
     it will reflect the actual time spent on news reading. The usage
     statistics can be summarized using the nnusage(1M) program.

V - validation errors
     When inconsistencies are detected in the database during validation, an
     entry for each corrupted group will be entered in the log file.

X - expire statistics
     Messages similar to the Collect statistics reporting the result of
     running expire on the database. Reports related to ignoring, removing,
     renumbering, and reactivation of groups are also given class X.

To extract a specific entry class, grep(1) is used, so it may take a while on a
large log file.

There are also a few special operations on the log file:

G)roup
     Extract the entries which refers to a specified group.

(1-9) tail
     Invoke tail(1) to extract the last 10-90 entries in the log file.

space
     Equivalent to 1 (list last 10 lines of log).

(.) all
     Display the complete log file.

(@) clean [Y]
     Move the Log file to Log.old, and create a new empty Log file. If you
     want to clean out the old log file as well, simply repeat the clean
     operation (this will result in an empty Log.old file.)

From: NNADMIN
Subject: THE GROUP MENU

When you enter the group menu (identified by the GROUP prompt), nnadmin will
prompt you for the name of a news group, which you can enter with the usual
completion feature described in the nn(1) manual. You can then perform the
following operations on the specified group:

C)lear_flag
     Clear a group specific flag. See the section on group flags below.

D)ata
     Dump the contents of the data file containing the extracted article
     headers for the group.

E)xpire
     Request the nnmaster to run expire on the group.

F)iles
     List the files (using ls(1)) containing the index and data for the group.

G)roup
     Switch to another group.

H)eader
     Dump the master index entry for the group.

R)ecollect
     Request the nnmaster to recollect all articles in the group.

S)et_flag
     Set a group specific flag. See the section on group flags below.

V)alidate
     Perform validation on the group's database information.

Z)ap [Y]
     Remove group from news system - this will be done by running the rmgroup
     program which must reside in the NEWS_LIB directory. Of course, this
     should be done with great caution.

From: NNADMIN
Subject: INDIVIDUAL GROUP FLAGS

You can set and clear the following flags for individual groups to control the
future behaviour of nnmaster on that group.

Notice that these flags will be reset to their default value if you
reinitialize the database using nnmaster -I. To change these flags
permanently, they should be set or cleared in the GROUPS file.

A)lways_digest
     Normally, nnmaster will only attempt to split digests into individual
     articles if it can easily recognize an article as a digest. This requires
     that the word "digest" appears somewhere in the subject line, and that
     one of the first few lines in the body of the article loosely matches the
     subject. A few news groups frequently receives digests which break one or
     both of these requirements. To have nnmaster split these digests into
     individual articles anyway, you can turn on the "always digest" flag on
     these news groups. This will instruct nnmaster to treat all articles in
     the group as digests (naturally, articles which are then found not to
     contain other articles are still treated as normal articles.)

C)ontrol
     This is a special flag for the control group. It indicates that the
     "Newsgroups:" field in the article header cannot be trusted (it does not
     specify the groups to which the article has been posted.)

D)irectory missing
     This flag indicates that the spool directory for the news group cannot be
     found (the group has probably been removed with rmgroup(1M)). It is set
     automatically be the nnmaster if it cannot access the directory. When the
     flag is set, nnmaster completely ignores the group, so it can be used to
     disable news collection in specific groups. If you recreate the group or
     the directory manually, you must also clear this flag to have the
     nnmaster recognize the group again.

M)oderated
     Indicates that the group is moderated. This flag is normally initialized
     automatically from the active file, and it should not be changed lightly.

N)ever_digest
     This is the opposite of the "always digest" flag; when set, the nnmaster
     will never attempt to split any articles in that group into subarticles.

From: NNADMIN
Subject: DATABASE STATISTICS DISPLAY

When you select the (S)tat operation in the main or master menus, you will get
some general statistics about the database:

initialized
     The time when the database was last rebuild using nnmaster -I.

last_scan, last_size
     The time stamp on the active file and its size the last time the nnmaster
     read it.

no of groups
     The total number of groups in the database.

Articles
     The total number of articles in all groups. This is not an exact number,
     because it will count split digests as a single article (making the
     number too small), and it may count some articles that have been expired
     (making the number too large).

Disk usage
     The total number of (1 kbyte) disk blocks occupied by the database.

From: NNADMIN
Subject: MASTER INDEX ENTRIES

The master index entries displayed when you select the (H)eader operation in
the master and group menus contain the following information:

group_name  group_number
     The first line of the display will show the name of the group and the
     internal group number which is used to identify the group in the
     database.

first/last art
     This is the numbers of the first and last article that are currently
     stored in the database.

active info
     This is the numbers of the first and last article in the news system as
     read from the active file. They will normally match the numbers above,
     but they may differ while the nnmaster is working on the group (or it has
     not yet collected all the articles in the group).

Offsets: index->..., data->...
     These values show the starting position for the next write operation on
     the index and data files. They are primarily used for consistency
     checking and recovery after a system crash, but after an "expire by
     rewrite" operation (expire method 2) which is performed "in-situ", the
     data and index files may physically be longer than the actual data stored
     in them.

Flags:
     This shows the current flags set for this group. If no flags are set, the
     field is omitted from the display. One extra flag which was not explained
     above is the BLOCKED flag; it is a temporary locking flag set on a group
     by the nnmaster while it is updating the database files for that group to
     prevent nn clients to access that group.

From: NNADMIN
Subject: RAW DATABASE DISPLAY

When you select the (D)ata operation on the group menu, you will get a
combined display of the raw data and index files for that group. The index
file contains a single 32 bit value for each existing article number. This
value is an offset into the data file pointing to the header for the
corresponding article.

When nn want to access the article from number N to the last article, it looks
up the offset for article number N in the index file, and uses this as the
starting point for reading article header information in the data file. It
then simply reads to the end of the data file in which the article headers for
articles number N+1, N+2, and so on follows immediately after the header for
article number N.

The article header information is presented in a very terse form; each of the
output lines are described below for reference purposes:

offset = xxxx    , article # = nnnnn   (type)
     This shows the offset into the data file and the article number. The
     offset is stored in the index file for quick access. If no type is
     printed it is a normal article. Other types are: "digest header" and
     "digest sub-article".

xpost(count):  nnn, nnn, nnn, ...
     Cross-postings to other groups are encoded as a list of internal group
     numbers.

ts=nn hp=nn fp=nn lp=nn ref=nn[+Re] lines=nn
     These values are used by nn to sort, present, and access an article:
     ts is the time stamp on the article; it is a simple encoding of the
     posting date and time found in the Date: field.
     hp, fp, and lp are offsets into the file containing the article text: the
     header position, first text position, and last text position. The first
     will be zero for normal articles, but not for articles in a split digest.
     The last will be equal to the length of the file for normal articles, but
     not inside digests.
     ref is the number of references on the Reference: line. If "+Re" follows
     the number, the subject line contained a "Re:" prefix which has been
     removed.

Sender(length): name
     The name of the sender in "ready to print" format, i.e. reduced to 16
     characters as explained in the nn manual.

Subj(length): subject
     This is the full subject line from the article header (except for Re:
     prefixes in various formats).

From: NNADMIN
Subject: FILES

The $db, $lib, and $news used below are synonyms for the DB_DIRECTORY,
LIB_DIRECTORY, and the news system's lib directories respectively.
$db/MASTER      Database master index
$db/GROUPS      News group names in MASTER file order
$db/DATA/nnn.x  Index file for group number nnn
$db/DATA/nnn.d  Data file for group number nnn
$master/GATE    Message channel from nnadmin to nnmaster
$master/MPID    The process id of the nnmaster daemon.
$Log            The log file (truncate it regularly!)

The MASTER file contains a record for each news group, occurring in the same
sequence as the group names in the GROUPS file. The sequence also defines the
group numbers used to identify the files in the database and in a few other
places.

The GATE file will be created by nnadmin when needed, and removed by nnmaster
when it has read it. Therefore, to send a message to the nnmaster requires
that you are allowed to write in the $master directory.

From: NNADMIN
Subject: SEE ALSO

nn(1), nncheck(1), nngrep(1), nntidy(1)
nnquery(1M), nnusage(1M), nnmaster(8)

From: NNADMIN
Subject: WARNINGS

The GATE file is created with the owner and modes of the user that runs
nnadmin which may cause problems if the owner of the nnmaster process
(normally "news") is not allowed to read the created GATE file (a "umask" of
022 is ok.) Unless you allow ordinary users to create files in the LIB
directory where the GATE file resides, only the owner of the directory
(normally "news") and "root" can use nnadmin to send messages to the nnmaster.
However, to send a wakeup signal to the master, anybody can run
      nnmaster -w

From: NNADMIN
Subject: BUGS

The user interface is completely out of line with the rest of the nn family,
and the way to run nnadmin in the non-interactive mode is a bit bizarre. This
is not likely to change, because I believe there are more important things to
do!

From: NNADMIN
Subject: AUTHOR

Kim F. Storm, Texas Instruments A/S, Denmark
E-mail: storm@texas.dk

From: NNCHECK
Subject: - check for unread articles

nncheck - check for unread articles


From: NNCHECK
Subject: SYNOPSIS

nncheck [ -Q -r -t ] [ -f format ]

From: NNCHECK
Subject: DESCRIPTION

nncheck will report if there are some articles on the system which you have
not read.

Without options, nncheck will simply print a message reporting the number of
unread articles with the following format:
      There are 327 unread articles in 25 groups
and when there are no unread articles, the following message will be printed:
      No News (is good news)

nncheck will exit with a value of 0 if there are unread articles, and 99 if
there is no news (see the exception for the -r option.)

It is important to notice that even though unread articles have been reported
by nncheck, the actual number of unread articles may be much lower (or even
zero) when nn is invoked to read the articles. This is because the calculation
of the number of unread articles is only based on recorded article number
intervals. Invoking nn to read the articles may reveal that the articles have
previously been read in another news group, have been expired, or are killed
using the auto-kill facility.

The following options are used to modify the amount and format of the output
from nncheck:

-Q   Quiet operation. No output is produced, only the exit status indicate
     whether there is unread news.

-t   Print the name of each group with unread articles, and how many unread
     articles there are (not counting split digests!).

-r   Output a single integer value specifying the number of unread articles,
     and exit with a 0 status (somebody told me this would be useful).

-f format
     Output the number of unread articles using the specified format. The
     format is a text that may contain the following %-escapes:
          %-code    resulting output
          %u        "uuu unread articles"
          %g        "ggg groups"
          %i        "is" if 1 unread article, else "are"
          %U        "uuu"
          %G        "ggg"
     where uuu is the number of unread articles, and ggg is the number of
     groups with unread articles.
     For example, the default output format is
           "There %i %u in %g"
     which I prefer to the following less perfect format:
           "There are %U unread article(s) in %G group(s)"



From: NNCHECK
Subject: FILES

~/.newsrc   The record of read articles
$db/MASTER  The database master index


From: NNCHECK
Subject: SEE ALSO

nn(1), nngoback(1), nngrab(1), nngrep(1), nnpost(1), nntidy(1)
nnadmin(1M), nnusage(1M), nnmaster(1M)

From: NNCHECK
Subject: AUTHOR

Kim F. Storm, Texas Instruments A/S, Denmark
E-mail: storm@texas.dk

From: NNGOBACK
Subject: - make news articles unread on a day-by-day basis (nn)

nngoback - make news articles unread on a day-by-day basis (nn)


From: NNGOBACK
Subject: SYNOPSIS

nngoback [ -NQvi ] [-d] days [ group ]...

From: NNGOBACK
Subject: DESCRIPTION

nngoback will rewind the .newsrc record file of nn(1) one or more days. It can
be used to rewind all groups, or only a specified set of groups. In other
words, nngoback can mark news articles which have arrived on the system during
the last days days unread.

Only subscribed groups that occur in the current presentation sequence are
rewound. That means that if no group arguments are specified, all groups
occurring in the sequence defined in the init file will be rewound. Otherwise,
only the groups specified on the argument line will be rewound.

When a group is rewound, the information about selections, partially read
digests etc. are discarded. It will print notifications about this unless the
-Q (quiet) option is used.

If the -i (interactive) option is specified, nngoback will report for each how
many articles can be marked unread, and ask for confirmation before going back
in that group.

If the -v (verbose) option is specified, nngoback will report how many
articles are marked unread.

If the -N (no-update) option is specified, nngoback will perform the entire
goback operation, but not update the .newsrc file.

If you are not up-to-date with your news reading, you can also use nngoback to
catch up to only have the last few days of news waiting to be read in the
following way:
      nn -a0
      nngoback 3
The nn command will mark all articles in all groups as read (answer all to the
catch-up question.) The following nngoback will then make the last three days
of news unread again.

Examples:

nngoback 0
     Mark the articles which have arrived today as unread.

nngoback 1
     Mark the articles which have arrived yesterday and today as unread.

nngoback 6
     Mark the articles which have arrived during the last week as unread.

You cannot go more than 14 days back with nngoback. (You can change this limit
as described below.)

From: NNGOBACK
Subject: THE BACK_ACT DAEMON

It is a prerequisite for the use of nngoback that the script back_act is
executed at an appropriate time once (and only once) every day. Preferably
this is done by cron right before the bacth of news for `today' is received.
back_act will maintain copies of the active file for the last 14 days.

Optionally, the back_act program accepts a single numerical argument
specifying how many copies of the active file it should maintain. This is
useful if news is expired after 7 days, in which case keeping more than 7 days
of active file copies is wasteful.

From: NNGOBACK
Subject: FILES

~/.newsrc            The record of read articles.
~/.newsrc.goback     The original rc file before goback.
$db/active.N         The N days `old' active file.
$master/back_act     Script run by cron to maintain old active files.


From: NNGOBACK
Subject: SEE ALSO

nn(1), nncheck(1), nngrab(1), nngrep(1), nnpost(1), nntidy(1)
nnadmin(1M), nnusage(1M), nnmaster(8)

From: NNGOBACK
Subject: NOTES

nngoback does not check the age of the `old' active files; it will blindly
believe that active.0 was created today, and that active.7 is really seven
days old! Therefore, the back_act script should be run once and only once
every day for nngoback to work properly.

The days are counted relative to the time the active files were copied.

From: NNGOBACK
Subject: AUTHOR

Kim F. Storm, Texas Instruments A/S, Denmark
E-mail: storm@texas.dk

From: NNGRAB
Subject: - news retrieval by keyword (nn)

nngrab - news retrieval by keyword (nn)


From: NNGRAB
Subject: SYNOPSIS

nngrab [ -c ] keyword

From: NNGRAB
Subject: DESCRIPTION

nngrab invokes nn on all USENET articles whose subject (or keyword) field(s)
contain an instance of keyword. nngrab is a fast equivalent for:
      nn -mxX -s/keyword all

For example,
      nngrab tesla
will retrieve items concerning Nikola Tesla.

Keyword case is ignored unless -c is specified, and the keyword can be a
regular expressions (escaped to avoid conflicts with the shell). For example,
      nngrab "n.*tesla"

The range of search includes all newsgroups on the system, including ones
which are unsubscribed.

From: NNGRAB
Subject: FILES

$db/subjects    subject database


From: NNGRAB
Subject: SEE ALSO

nn(1), nnspew(8), egrep(1)

From: NNGRAB
Subject: NOTES

nngrab can be much faster than the equivalent command shown above, if the
tertiary news subject database generated by the nnspew(8) daemon exists. To
enable the faster operation, nnspew must be executed regularly by cron.

nngrab uses egrep(1) to scan the subject database, so if you are not running
fast egrep (GNU-style) this is all for naught.

nngrab will use a subject database generated by nnspew independent of its age.
Thus, if you stop running nnspew, remember to remove the subjects file as
well.

From: NNGRAB
Subject: BUGS

Under version 6.4 onwards, search of the "Keywords:" field is not supported.
Search on name is not possible either.

From: NNGRAB
Subject: AUTHOR

James A. Woods, NASA Ames Research Center
E-mail: jaw@ames.arc.nasa.gov

From: NNGREP
Subject: - grep for news group names (nn)

nngrep - grep for news group names (nn)


From: NNGREP
Subject: SYNOPSIS

nngrep [ -ainprsu ] [ -l ] [ pattern ]

From: NNGREP
Subject: DESCRIPTION

nngrep can print various selections of the available news groups.

Without options, nngrep will list all currently subscribed newsgroups whose
name matches any of the specified patterns. If no pattern is specified, all
subscribed groups will be listed.

The selection of news groups against which the patterns are matches, and
subsequently printed by nngrep can be limited or expanded using the following
command line options and arguments:

-a   Use both subscribed and unsubscribed groups. Overrides the -u option.

-i   Use only ignored groups, i.e. which are not in the presentation sequence.

-n   Use only new groups. Notice that nn considers a group to be new until you
     have read at least one article in the group, or you have unsubscribed to
     the group. This means that even reasonable active news groups may remain
     "new" for quite some time if it only contains articles which are
     cross-posted to other groups which occur earlier in your presentation
     sequence.

-p   Use only groups with unread (pending) articles.

-r   Use only read groups, i.e. without unread articles.

-s   Use only groups which are in the presentation sequence.

-u   Use only unsubscribed groups.

These options can be combined if they don't logically exclude each other.

For example, to get the names of all "source" groups, you can use the command
      nngrep source

You can use this to read a specific subset of news groups with nn; for example
      nn `nngrep -sp source`

From: NNGREP
Subject: LONG LISTING

A long listing of the matched groups can be requested with the -l option. It
will include the following information:

SUBSCR      Specifies whether the group is subscribed or not (yes/no).
NEW         Specifies whether the group is new or not (yes/no).
UNREAD      Shows the number of unread articles in the group (if any).
SEQUENCE    Shows the group's index in the presentation sequence.
GROUP       The name of the group.


From: NNGREP
Subject: FILES

~/.newsrc   The record of read articles
~/.nn/init  The presentation sequence


From: NNGREP
Subject: SEE ALSO

nn(1), nncheck(1), nngoback(1), nngrab(1), nnpost(1), nntidy(1)
nnadmin(1M), nnusage(1M), nnmaster(8)

From: NNGREP
Subject: AUTHOR

Kim F. Storm, Texas Instruments A/S, Denmark
E-mail: storm@texas.dk

From: NNMASTER
Subject: - nn database manager

nnmaster - nn database manager


From: NNMASTER
Subject: SYNOPSIS

nnmaster -I [lmit]
nnmaster -w
nnmaster -v
nnmaster -l [ "lock message" ]
nnmaster [ options ] [ groups ]
nnmaster -F [ options ] [ groups ]

From: NNMASTER
Subject: DESCRIPTION

nnmaster is the daemon which is responsible for building and maintaining the
database used by the nn(1) news reader.

Normally, nnmaster is started when the system enters multi-user mode, and runs
until system shutdown. To facilitate this, you should place the following call
in /etc/rc (or similar) to invoke the nnmaster daemon:
      $master/nnmaster -l -r -C
where $master is the MASTER_DIRECTORY defined during configuration of nn.

When nnmaster is started as specified above, it will first unlock the database
in case it was locked (-l), perform a thorough consistency check on the
database (-C).

Then, every 10 minutes (-r), it will look at the time-stamp of the news active
file to see whether new articles have arrived on the system (or whether
articles have been expired). (See -U)

If the active file has been modified, nnmaster will collect the header
information from the new articles and enter them into the database (or remove
the headers of the expired articles from the database).

If it detects that some articles have been expired, it will automatically
remove the header information of the expired articles from the database.

From: NNMASTER
Subject: ARTICLE COLLECTION OPTIONS

Normally, nnmaster will collect all available news groups defined in the news
active file. The set of collected groups can be controlled via the argument
line. Groups can be either included or excluded:
A group name, e.g. comp, will cause the group and all its subgroups to be
collected. Individual groups, e.g. news.software.nn, can also be specified
A group name preceded by an exclamation mark, e.g. !talk.politics, will cause
the group and all its subgroups to be ignored.
An empty argument, i.e. "", will cause all groups that are not ignored to be
collected. For example, to collect everything but rec and misc, use the
following command:
      nnmaster -r !rec !misc ""
If the empty argument had been omitted, nothing would be collected, since the
presence of any groups arguments causes nnmaster to ignore all groups which
are not explicitly mentioned.
Example 1: The following commands can be executed by cron to collect different
sets of groups at different intervals or under different conditions:
      nnmaster -B -O14 rec misc sci -LBO -u
      nnmaster !rec !misc !sci "" -u
Example 2: The group arguments are used in the given sequence, e.g. to leave
out comp.sys, but still collect comp.sys.ibm.pc, use the command:
      nnmaster -r comp.sys.ibm.pc !comp.sys ""
The use of the -u option in the first example is essential, since each of the
commands will update the active file time stamp which will prevent the other
command from detecting new articles that have arrived.
Using this method to keep specific groups out of the database must be used
with great caution; just a single invocation of nnmaster without any arguments
will collect all the otherwise ignored groups!

From: NNMASTER
Subject: COLLECTION OF ARTICLES

The following options control how nnmaster performs the collection of new
articles.

-r [ min ]
     Daemon mode. The nnmaster will put itself in the background (unless -f is
     also specified), and will checks for arrival of new articles and expired
     articles every min minutes (and update the database accordingly). If min
     is omitted, the default is to check every 10 minutes.
     Without the -r option, the nnmaster will just perform a single collection
     of new articles (if any) and then exit. This can be used to have the
     nnmaster started by cron(8) at regular intervals instead of having it as a
     daemon which sleeps between checking for new articles. Since the nnmaster
     is a bit expensive to start up (it has to read a few files), it is up to
     you to decide which mode is best on your system. (I have also heard that
     it works to call nnmaster without -r from inews(1). I cannot recommend
     this unless you receive batched news; invoking nnmaster for every
     received article sounds too expensive to me.)

-h [ sec ]
     Hold collection of new articles until next scan if new articles have
     arrived withing the last sec [60] seconds. This is useful to prevent
     nnmaster from competing for disk i/o with an rnews process which is
     unbatching incoming news, or a running expire process. It will have the
     side effect of limiting the number of C: entries in the log, since
     collection of incoming batches will typically be done in larger thunks.

-f   Run nnmaster in foreground in daemon mode (see -r). Useful if nnmaster is
     invoked from inittab. (Notice that if you use a respawn entry in inittab,
     you will not be able to stop nnmaster using the -k option, since init
     will immediately start another master.)

-C   Perform a consistency check on the database on start-up, and rebuild
     corrupted database files. This operation can be quite time-consuming
     since it reads through all the database files.

-b   Normally, articles without a proper news header (no Newsgroups: line) are
     ignored. Specifying the -b option causes these `bad' articles to be
     included in the database (normally with no sender or subject).

-B   Remove `bad' articles. Sometimes, articles without a header ends up in
     the news spool directory. These articles have no article id, and
     therefore, they will never be expired by expire(8). This option will
     allow the nnmaster to silently remove these articles (a `B' entry will
     occur in the log file).

-O days
     Ignore articles which are older than the given number of days. This may
     help keep old 'stray' articles out of the database. If the -B options is
     also specified, the old articles will be removed from the news spool
     directories. Old ignored or removed articles will be reported with an `O'
     entry in the log file. This option can be disable for individual groups
     by the O flag in the GROUPS file (see below).

-R N Specifies how the auto-recollect operation is performed on the groups
     having this option set in the GROUPS file (see below). Four methods are
     available (default is method 1):
     1: Run expire on the group when new articles arrive.
     2: Run expire on the group on every scan.
     3: Recollect all articles when new articles arrive.
     4: Recollect all articles on every scan.

-M mode
     Normally, nnmaster will send a message via mail to the news administrator
     (OWNER) when an error or potential problems (primarily nntp related)
     occur. This can be restricted to only fatal errors (nnmaster terminated)
     if mode is 1, and disabled completely if mode is 0.

-Q   Normally, nnmaster will print a message on the system console or in the
     syslog if a fatal error happens. This option will prevent this, so only a
     type 'E' entry is written to the Log file.

From: NNMASTER
Subject: DATABASE EXPIRATION

Since articles does not stay forever in the news system, the database must be
cleaned up regularly to remove the information stored for expired articles.
Expiration of the database is normally scheduled using the nnadmin(1M) command
executed by cron at a suitable time when expire on the news articles has
completed. The following command will send a message to the nnmaster and cause
it to initiate expire on all news groups:
      nnadmin =EYW

Selective expiration of individual groups can be done from nnadmin
(interactive mode). It can also be done by invoking nnmaster with the -F
option. For example, the following command will run expire on all groups
except the `rec' groups:
      nnmaster -F -k !rec ""
The -k option is required to terminate the currently running master since two
daemons cannot be running at the same time. Thus to run expire (on all groups)
in this way from cron, the following commands must be used:
      nnmaster -Fk "" ; nnmaster -r ...

It is also possible to have nnmaster detect expiration automatically (see -e).
This requires that the min field in the active file is updated by the news
expire (this is not the default case when Cnews is used). However, this is not
always a safe indication since the first article may not have been expired,
while a lot of other articles have been deleted.

There are several strategies available in the nnmaster to do this clean-up,
each having their strengths and weaknesses.

Method 1 (default): Rebuilds the database from the existing database
information by comparing the current database contents with the contents of
the news group directories, eliminating entries whose file no longer exists.
This method is guaranteed to eliminate all expired articles from the database,
and it is reasonably fast because it only has to read the directories, not
each article file.
      If news is accessed remotely via nntp, the list of existing articles
cannot efficiently be fetched by reading a local directory. Instead an XHDR
request is sent to the nntp server to get a list of articles.

Method 2: Eliminates only the expired articles before the first article in the
group. This is very fast since only the active file and the database itself is
accessed, but it will obviously leave some expired articles in the database.
This method requires that the min field in the active file is updated by
expire.

Method 3: Discard the current database information and recollects all
articles. This is obviously very time consuming, and it is therefore not
recommended, especially not with nntp.

The options related to database expiration are:

-E N Select expire method N. (If N is omitted, the default method is used).

-e [N]
     Automatically run expire in the database on groups where the min number
     in the active file has increased by N (1 if omitted) articles. This is
     disabled by default (since the min field is often unreliable).

-F   Run expire once and exit. If a list of groups is specified on the command
     line, the matched groups (see the rules above) will be marked for
     expiration. If no groups are specified, only the groups already scheduled
     for expire will be expired. Consequently, to expire all groups, a blank
     argument "" (matching all groups) must be specified.

From: NNMASTER
Subject: DATABASE LOCKING

The database can be locked centrally, which will normally disallow all access
to the database, and even block nnmaster from being (accidentally) started.
When a lock is set on the database, all currently running clients will
terminate the next time they try to access the database. Setting a lock on the
database can thus also be used to force running clients to terminate.

The following options set and clear locks on the database:

-l message
     Locks the database with the given message. The message will be displayed
     every time a program tries to access the database.

-l   Unlock the database if it was locked.

-i   Ignore a possible lock and continue. This can be used to have nnmaster
     operate on a database which is blocked from normal user access.

Since only one nnmaster can operate on the database at any one time, a running
nnmaster daemon must be stopped before a lock can be set on the database. If
neither -f nor -r is specified with the -l option (in both forms), nnmaster
will terminate after setting or clearing the lock.

From: NNMASTER
Subject: DATABASE INITIALIZATION

The following options are used to initialize and update the central database
files:

-I [limit]
     Initialize database. This option will erase an existing database, and
     create an empty database containing entries for the currently known
     groups. nnmaster will offer you to use an existing GROUPS file when
     initializing the database.
     The optional limit can be used to put a limit on the number of articles
     that will be collected in each group during the first collection of
     articles following the database initialization. This is useful on systems
     where the 'min' field in the active file is unreliable or not maintained
     (Cnews doesn't) to limit the work done to do the initial collection of
     news after the initialization of the database. If news is accessed
     remotely from an NNTP server, this is even more important! If limit is
     omitted, or is zero, nnmaster will trust the min field and collect all
     articles in the range min..last.

-G   Reread the GROUPS file. This option is used to instruct nnmaster to parse
     the GROUPS file after it has been edited. See the section on the GROUPS
     file below.

From: NNMASTER
Subject: MISCELLANEOUS OPTIONS

The following options controls various details of the nnmaster's behaviour:

-D [ N ]
     Run nnmaster in "debug mode". If N is omitted, or equals 1 or 3, this
     will produce a compact but still very informative trace of the collection
     or expire process directly on the terminal. This is most useful when
     doing the first collection of articles after initializing the database
     with -I. If N is 2 or 3, a trace of the NNTP traffic is written to a file
     nnmaster.log in the TMP directory. This option disables -r.

-H   Identifies the host which nnmaster is running on as the nntp-server for
     its clients, i.e. that it can access the news spool directory locally
     without using NNTP. Normally, nnmaster will detect this by itself by
     comparing the host name to the contents of the nntp_server file, so this
     option should really be superfluous.

-y retries
     In some networked environment, opening an article (shared from another
     machine via NFS) may fail for no obvious reason. Using this option, it is
     possible to cause nnmaster to perform retries attempts to open an article
     before marking the article as non-existing in the database.

-L types
     Exclude the specified entry types from the log file. This is normally
     used to exclude the 'C'ollecting and e'X'pire entries (-LCXO).

-t   Trace the collection process. This will place a lot of information into
     the log file (T: entries).

-u   Normally, nnmaster will just compare the time-stamp on the active file
     with a time-stamp saved in the database to see if new articles have
     arrived. The -u option forces the nnmaster to read the active file on
     start-up to see if new articles have arrived.

-U   Some SVR4 systems (and maybe SunOS) have a useful "feature". Writing
     files with mmap() may not update the last-changed timestamp on the file.
     Since INN uses mmap() for writing the active file, this becomes a problem
     for nnmaster. The -U option causes nnmaster to unconditionally read the
     active file each time the repeat delay (-r) time expires.

-v   Print the release and version identification for nnmaster, and exit.

-w   Wakeup the real nnmaster. Send a signal to the nnmaster daemon to have it
     check for new articles immediately.

-k   Kill the already running nnmaster daemon before proceeding with the
     operation specified by the other options (or terminate if no other
     operation is requested).

From: NNMASTER
Subject: THE GROUPS FILE

The primary purpose of the GROUPS file is to store the names of the news
groups represented in the database. Each line in the file corresponds to an
entry in the (binary) MASTER file, and the sequence of the lines in the GROUPS
file must never be changed unless the database is reinitialized afterwards.

However, the contents of the lines in the GROUPS file can be edited to control
how the nnmaster should handle each individual group.

The format of each line is:
      news.group.name [ timestamp ] [ flags ]

The news group name is the name of the group, and must not be changed in any
way. If the group is no longer in the news active file, and consequently the
group does no longer exist, group name can be replaced by a `@' character
which will instruct nnmaster to ignore this entry without having to rebuild
the entire database.

The optional time stamp indicates when the line was added to the GROUPS file
and is used by nn to detect new groups. When the GROUPS file is built
initially from the active file, the time stamps are omitted which simply means
that they are "old".

One or more of the following flags can be added to the GROUPS line to control
nnmaster's handling of the group:

D    Causes nnmaster to treat all articles in the group as digests, even when
     they don't initially look like digests. Articles which are found not to
     be digests after all, are still not digested.

N    Instructs nnmaster to never digest any articles in the group.

O    Disables the -O option for this group, i.e. all existing articles will be
     included in the database (and they will not be removed if the -B option
     is specified). This flag should be set on groups which you never expire,
     or have a very long expire time!

R    Causes nnmaster to recollect all available articles in the group whenever
     a new article is received. This is said to be useful is some high-traffic
     clarinet groups with many cancelled articles.

>file
     Instructs nnmaster to append all new articles to the specified file. This
     makes it possible to keep specific groups out of the way of expire. The
     archive file can be access directly from the nn client using the
     goto-group command. The file name must be a full path name to a file in
     an existing, writeable directory.

@    Instructs nnmaster to completely ignore this group - this is equivalent
     to setting the group name to `@' as described above.

! or X
     Causes nnmaster to ignore the group and not collect the group's articles
     in the database.

Comments (starting with `#' and continuing to the end of line) and empty lines
are allow in the GROUPS file, but it is strongly recommended to keep the
changes to the GROUPS file as small as possible, because of the implicit
correspondence with the binary MASTER file.

It is not recommended to edit the GROUPS file while nnmaster is running
because it may add new groups to the file. After editing the GROUPS file, the
command
      nnmaster -G
must be run before restarting the nnmaster to parse and verify the new GROUPS
file.

From: NNMASTER
Subject: NNTP SUPPORT

The nnmaster can access the news articles from a local news spool directory as
well as from an NNTP server. When compiled with NNTP enabled, nnmaster will
compare the name of the NNTP server and the name of the local host; if they
are identical, nnmaster will bypass NNTP and access the articles directly.

When it has to access the news articles via NNTP, it cannot time-stamp the
active file, so instead it transfers the entire active file from the NNTP
server and compares it with a local copy of the last active file fetched from
the NNTP server. This is not very expensive in terms of cpu-cycles, disk-load,
or net-bandwidth, but to stay on friendly terms with the NNTP server
administrator, you should probably not use shorter update intervals than the
standard 10 minutes.

Setting a much higher update interval than the standard 10 minutes is not
really recommended either, since an update normally implies fetching a burst
of news articles from the NNTP server, so setting the interval too long may
imply that the load on the NNTP server will be more un-even.

In expire method 1, the use of XHDR just to get a list of existing articles in
a group is definitely a waste of resources on the nntp server (but still lower
than using method 3). Before using the XHDR request, nnmaster will send a
non-standard "LISTGROUP" request; if the nntp server supports this request, it
should return an OK_HEAD status followed by an (unordered) list of article
numbers (one per line) terminated by a `.' line. The nntp servers supporting
this request will be much less loaded during expire.

The -O option does not work with NNTP. The -B option will only work with NNTP
if the nnmaster is running on the NNTP server.

From: NNMASTER
Subject: FILES

The $db, $master, and $news names used below are synonyms for the
DB_DIRECTORY, MASTER_DIRECTORY, and NEWS_LIB_DIRECTORY defined during
configuration.

$db/MASTER          Database master index
$db/GROUPS          News group names and flags in MASTER file order
$db/DATA/nnn.[dx]   Database files for group number nnn
.../.nn[dx]         Database files if located in the group directories
$master/GATE        Message channel from nnadmin to nnmaster
$master/MPID        The process id of the nnmaster daemon.
$Log                The log file (the location is configuration dependent)
$news/active        Existing articles and groups
/usr/lib/nntp_serverContains the name of the NNTP server.

The MASTER file contains a record for each news group, occurring in the same
sequence as the group names in the GROUPS file. The sequence also defines the
group numbers used to identify the files in the database's DATA directory.

The GATE file will be created by nnadmin when needed, and removed by nnmaster
when it has read it. Therefore, to send a message to the nnmaster requires
that you are allowed to write in the $master directory.

The contents of the Log file are described in the nnadmin manual.

From: NNMASTER
Subject: SEE ALSO

nn(1), nncheck(1), nngrep(1), nntidy(1)
nnadmin(1M), nnspew(8), nnusage(1M)

From: NNMASTER
Subject: AUTHOR

Kim F. Storm, Texas Instruments A/S, Denmark
E-mail: storm@texas.dk

From: NNPOST
Subject: - post news articles (nn)

nnpost - post news articles (nn)


From: NNPOST
Subject: SYNOPSIS

nnpost [ -dksy string ] [ -f file ] [ -p ] [ group... ]

From: NNPOST
Subject: DESCRIPTION

nnpost is used to post new articles using nn's normal interface, but without
entering nn in reading mode.

When started, it reads the init file and then directly executes nn's :post
command.

It will prompt for a (comma-separated) list of news groups, the article
subject, a list of keywords, a summary, and the distribution of the article.
Each of these prompts can also be supplied via command line options or
arguments as described below.

When prompted for the "Newsgroup:", entering a ? as the first key will cause
nnpost to list all the known news groups and their purpose (if this
information is available). You can also enter / followed by a word or regular
expression which will cause nnpost to produce a (much) shorter listing only
containing the groups whose name and/or purpose description matches the
regular expression. When paging through either list, you can enter q to quit
the listing.

If a source file is specified with -f it will be used as the initial article
body. If the -p option is also specified, the article is posted directly
without editing.

nnpost can be used to do unattended postings if sufficient arguments are
provided on the command line to build the header and the body of the article.
The required arguments are: one or more newsgroups, a subject (-s), a source
file (-f), a distribution (-d), and the -p option. Other fields which are not
specified (e.g. keywords) will not be included in the header. The contents of
the news-header variable in the init file will be included in the header.

From: NNPOST
Subject: OPTIONS


-d distribution
     Use the specified distribution for the article.

-k "keywords"
     Associate the specified keywords with the article.

-s "subject"
     Use the specified subject for the new article.

-y "summary"
     Include the given summary in the article header.

-f file
     Read the article body from the specified file.

-p   Post the article specified with -f without editing.

From: NNPOST
Subject: FILES

~/.nn/init  The control variables for nnpost.


From: NNPOST
Subject: SEE ALSO

nn(1)

From: NNPOST
Subject: AUTHOR

Kim F. Storm, Texas Instruments A/S, Denmark
E-mail: storm@texas.dk

From: NNSPEW
Subject: - subject database manager (nn)

nnspew - subject database manager (nn)


From: NNSPEW
Subject: SYNOPSIS

nnspew

From: NNSPEW
Subject: DESCRIPTION

nnspew builds a sorted database of all available subjects in the nn article
database for fast access via the nngrab utility.

nnspew should be activated regularly to rebuild the subject database, e.g. by
cron. For example:
      2 6,9,12,15,18,21 * * * root /bin/nice /usr/lib/nn/nnspew

Cross posted articles are only represented in the database once, and identical
subjects in each group are merged into one to use a minimum of disk space.
This saves about 50% of the disk space otherwise required.

From: NNSPEW
Subject: FILES

$db/subjects    subject database


From: NNSPEW
Subject: SEE ALSO

nn(1), nngrab(1), egrep(1)

From: NNSPEW
Subject: NOTES

nngrap will use the subject database generated by nnspew independent of its
age. Thus, if you stop running nnspew, remember to remove the subjects file as
well.

From: NNSPEW
Subject: BUGS

nnmaster should automatically append new articles to the subject database to
keep it up-to-date, and thus require less frequent rebuilding using nnspew.

From: NNSPEW
Subject: AUTHOR

James A. Woods, NASA Ames Research Center
E-mail: jaw@ames.arc.nasa.gov

From: NNSTATS
Subject: - display nnmaster collection and expire statistics

nnstats - display nnmaster collection and expire statistics


From: NNSTATS
Subject: SYNOPSIS

nnstats [ -lt ] [ -d month day ] [ -m month ] [ logfile ]...

From: NNSTATS
Subject: DESCRIPTION

nnstats will extract the collection (C) and expiration (X) entries from the
log file and calculate total and average number of articles, groups and
elapsed time per day, per month, or for the duration of the whole log file.

Normally only a summary for the specified period is printed. If -l is
specified, the statistics for each day in the period is also printed, and if
-t is specified the summary is not printed.

Normally the statistics is collected for all days in the log files (or the
current log file if one is not specified).

If "-m month" is specified, the statistics for that month is calculated. The
month is specified in normal date notation, i.e. a capitalized three letter
abbreviation like Jan, Feb, ...

If "-d month day" is specified, the statistics for that date only is
calculated and printed.

From: NNSTATS
Subject: FILES

.../Log             The log file


From: NNSTATS
Subject: SEE ALSO

nn(1), nnusage(1M), nnadmin(1M), nnmaster(8)

From: NNSTATS
Subject: NOTES

If nnmaster is run with options -LCX, nnstats will not work, because the
necessary entries are not written to the log file.

From: NNSTATS
Subject: AUTHORS

Mark Moraes <moraes@csri.toronto.edu>
Kim F. Storm <storm@texas.dk>

From: NNTIDY
Subject: - tidy your personal .newsrc file

nntidy - tidy your personal .newsrc file


From: NNTIDY
Subject: SYNOPSIS

nntidy [ -aciNQrsuv ] [ group ]...

From: NNTIDY
Subject: DESCRIPTION

nntidy will clean out non-existing groups, adjust obviously wrong article
numbers, and remove badly formed lines from your .newsrc file.

It may optionally remove ignored groups, unsubscribed groups, and groups which
are not part of your presentation sequence or the groups specified on the
command line.

You should run nntidy if your rc file has been corrupted for some reason.

From: NNTIDY
Subject: OPTIONS


-a   Equivalent to -cisu.

-c   Remove unrecognized lines. This will also remove the `options' line used
     by some older news readers, such as readnews(1)

-i   Remove entries for groups which are ignored in the database, e.g. entries
     marked with `X' in the GROUPS file.

-r   Remove entries for unsubscribed groups.

-s   Remove entries which are not included in the group presentation sequence
     defined in the init file. If one or more groups are specified on the
     command line, entries not matched by these groups (and their subgroups
     etc) will be removed.
     Notice that depending on how you construct the presentation sequence,
     this may cause unsubscribed groups to be removed from .newsrc, but this
     will not normally happen.

-u   Truncate entries for unsubscribed groups, by removing the article numbers
     and leaving only the news group name and the `!' mark.

-v   Verbose operation. Reports each change made to the .newsrc file.

-N   No update mode. The requested operations are performed, but the result is
     not written back to disk. This can be used with the -v option to see
     whether tidying is required.

-Q   Quiet operation. The version information is not printed.

From: NNTIDY
Subject: FILES

~/.newsrc           The record of read articles
~/.newsrc.tidy      The original rc file before tidy


From: NNTIDY
Subject: SEE ALSO

nn(1), nncheck(1), nngoback(1), nngrab(1), nngrep(1), nnpost(1)
nnadmin(1M), nnusage(1M), nnmaster(8)

From: NNTIDY
Subject: AUTHOR

Kim F. Storm, Texas Instruments A/S, Denmark
E-mail: storm@texas.dk

From: NNUSAGE
Subject: - display nn usage statistics

nnusage - display nn usage statistics


From: NNUSAGE
Subject: SYNOPSIS

nnusage [ -at ]

From: NNUSAGE
Subject: DESCRIPTION

nnusage will extract the usage entries from the log file and calculate the
total usage time for the current user, or for all nn users if -a is specified.

When -t is used with the -a option, nnusage will list the users ordered after
the total usage time. Otherwise, the output will be sorted according to user
names.

Since it is possible to suspend nn, or leave the terminal while nn is active,
nn tries to be intelligent when it calculates the usage time so it will truly
report the actual time spent on news reading.

From: NNUSAGE
Subject: FILES

.../Log             The log file


From: NNUSAGE
Subject: SEE ALSO

nn(1), nncheck(1), nngoback(1), nngrep(1), nntidy(1)
nnacct(1m), nnadmin(1M), nnquery(1M), nnmaster(8)

From: NNUSAGE
Subject: NOTES

If nn is compiled with ACCOUNTING turned on, then calls to nnusage are
converted into equivalent calls to nnacct.

The nn package must have been compiled with the STATISTICS option turned on to
produce the usage entries in the log file.

Only nn sessions longer than 5 minutes are registered in the log file.

From: NNUSAGE
Subject: AUTHOR

Kim F. Storm, Texas Instruments A/S, Denmark
E-mail: storm@texas.dk

