News

News

You can set up a simple electronic bulletin board facility with the /usr/news directory and the news(1) command. With news, you can post messages of interest about the system. This is not the same system as the publicly distributed Usenet system. Place announcements of interest about the system in the directory /usr/news. Use one file per announcement, and name each file something descriptive, like ''downtime'' and ''new-network.'' Use the news command to display the items.

You can automatically invoke news from a shell startup file, for example from the /etc/cshrc file. It is a good idea to check for new news items only from a shell startup file, since users may not be ready to read news immediately upon logging in. For example:

news -s

With the -s argument, news indicates how many articles there are since you last read news.

When you read news with the news command, you can do the following:

read everything

To read all news posted since the last time you read articles, enter the news command with no arguments: news

select some items

To read selected articles, enter the news command with the names of one or more items as arguments:

news downtime new-network

read and delete

After you run the news command, you can stop any item from printing by pressing <Ctrl-C> or <Break>. Pressing <Ctrl-C> or <Break> twice stops the program.

ignore everything

If you are too busy to read announcements at the moment, you can read them later. Items remain in /usr/news until the administrator (root) removes them. The list of news items is still displayed each time you log in.

flush all items

There are two ways to catch up with all current news items:

touch .news_time

This updates the time-accessed and time-modified fields of the .news_time file and thus the news program no longer considers there are articles for you to read.

This command prints all current articles, but sends the output to /dev/null so you do not see the articles:

news > /dev/null

This brings you up to date without reading any outstanding articles.