OPTIONS¶

-L

Just print a list of groups available at the server

-s server

Set news server to server

-P port

Set TCP port to port

-g group

Set newsgroup to group

-l user

Set user name to user. Setting this option turns NNTP authentication on. The password can be specified using the -p command line option, or using a passwod file (see later)

-p pass

Set password to pass.

-q

Be silent: do not display progress information

-u

Save subjects together with the assembled binaries. Subject files have the same name as the binary, with .sub extension added

-k

Keep original file names when possible, only rename when necessary to avoid a collission with existing files

-o dir

Set output directory to dir

-n num

Start with message number num

-c

Combine parts, even if they are from different newsgroups. Also, an article will be downloaded only once, even if it was crossposted to more than one newsgroups

-C

Combine parts, even if they are from different news servers

-X

Process single-part messages, too

-a pattern

Add pattern to the list of accept patterns. See next section on accept/reject patterns

-r pattern

Add pattern to the list of reject patterns

-A file

Read accept patterns from this file

-R file

Read reject patterns from this file

-t n

Use n number of parallel connections to the server. Default: 2. Set to 4 or more if you have a high speed network connection

-b break

Specify "break factor": the number of milliseconds to wait between retrieving lines from the server. Useful to share a low-speed connection with other applications

-m max

Specify the maximum number of messages to download

DOWNLOADED FILES¶

Grabbed files are collected in ~/.brag/<server>/<group>/finished (if not specified otherwise using the -o command line option). If combining parts from multiple servers ("-C" option), the results are collected in ~/.brag/all-servers/<group>/finished.

WORK FILES¶

Work files are kept in ~/.brag/<server>/<group>/unfinished or in ~/.brag/all-servers/<group>/unfinished if the "-C" option is used. It is recommended to regularly purge these directories by removing old files and subdirectories. What "old" means depends on the newsgroup's traffic; one week can be a good approximation.

PASSWORD FILES¶

Passwords can be specified on the command line, or for extra security, in password files. Each server can have its own password file, named ~/.brag/<server>/passwd. The format of these files is:

     user1:password1

     user2:password2

     ...

Passwords are not encoded. Take care of the file ownership and permissions.

ACCEPT AND REJECT FILES¶

If a file called accept is present in ~/.brag/<server>/<group>, its lines are added to the list of accept patterns. Empty ones and comments starting with "#" are ignored. Similarly, the contents of the file named reject will be added to the list of reject patterns.