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Manual page for news(1)

news - print news items

SYNOPSIS

news [ -a ] [ -n ] [ -s ] [ items ]

AVAILABILITY

SUNWesu

DESCRIPTION

news is used to keep the user informed of current events. By convention, these events are described by files in the directory /var/news.

When invoked without arguments, news prints the contents of all current files in /var/news, most recent first, with each preceded by an appropriate header. news stores the ``currency'' time as the modification date of a file named .news_time in the user's home directory (the identity of this directory is determined by the environment variable $HOME); only files more recent than this currency time are considered ``current.''

OPTIONS

-a: news prints all items, regardless of currency. In this case, the stored time is not changed.
-n: news reports the names of the current items without printing their contents, and without changing the stored time.
-s: news reports how many current items exist, without printing their names or contents, and without changing the stored time. It is useful to include such an invocation of news in one's .profile file, or in the system's /etc/profile.

All other arguments are assumed to be specific news items that are to be printed.

If a delete is typed during the printing of a news item, printing stops and the next item is started. Another delete within one second of the first causes the program to terminate.

ENVIRONMENT

If any of the LC_* variables ( LC_CTYPE, LC_MESSAGES, LC_TIME, LC_COLLATE, LC_NUMERIC, and LC_MONETARY ) (see environ.5 are not set in the environment, the operational behavior of news for each corresponding locale category is determined by the value of the LANG environment variable. If LC_ALL is set, its contents are used to override both the LANG and the other LC_* variables. If none of the above variables is set in the environment, the "C" (U.S. style) locale determines how news behaves.

LC_CTYPE: Determines how news handles characters. When LC_CTYPE is set to a valid value, news can display and handle text and filenames containing valid characters for that locale. news can display and handle Extended Unix Code (EUC) characters where any individual character can be 1, 2, or 3 bytes wide. news can also handle EUC characters of 1, 2, or more column widths. In the "C" locale, only characters from ISO 8859-1 are valid.

FILES

/etc/profile
/var/news/*
$HOME/.news_time