NAME¶

scanspool - Perform a sanity scan over all articles in news spool

SYNOPSIS¶

scanspool [-cnrv] [-a active-file] [-s spool-dir]

DESCRIPTION¶

scanspool is a Perl script for use with a tradspool article spool. It will scan the active file as well as all articles in the spool and report on the errors it encounters. As this may take a while, using the -v switch is recommended to see how far the program has progressed.

scanspool will skip any file named other than just all-digits when treating the contents of the news spool.

First, scanspool scans the active file, noting problems such as:

• malformed lines;
• duplicate entries;
• newsgroups aliased to a non-existent newsgroup;
• newsgroups aliased to a newsgroup that is also aliased.

Then it will examine all articles under your news spool directory, complaining about articles that:

• have a basename that starts with a leading 0;
• have a basename that is out of range according to the low and high water marks of the active file;
• do not contain a Newsgroups header field;
• are in a directory for which there is no newsgroup in the active file;
• are in a newsgroup to which they do not belong.

scanspool will also complain about directories with an all-digit component, in case the parent directory is a newsgroup with a high water mark below that all-digit component, as the name of such directories will conflict with a future article file with the same name.

scanspool understands aliased newsgroups. Thus, if an article is posted to foo.old.name that is aliased to foo.bar, it will be expected to be found under foo.bar and not foo.old.name.

scanspool assumes that the path of a valid newsgroup's directory from the root of the spool tree will not contain any "." character. Thus, directories such as out.going, tmp.dir, in.coming and news.archive will not be searched. This program also assumes that article basenames contain only decimal digits. Last, files under the top level directory lost+found are not scanned.

OPTIONS¶

-a active-file

The active file to use; pathdb/active is the default.

-c

Only check article filenames. scanspool will therefore not actually scan the Newsgroups header field of the articles.

-n

Don't throttle innd while scanning.

-r

Remove articles reported to have a problem. To see the list of articles in question, run scanspool without this flag first.

Be warned that using this flag may result in inaccessible articles if articles are removed whereas they are perfectly valid articles. Have a look at them to ensure they can be safely removed, and then use this flag.

-s spool-dir

The root of the spool tree; patharticles is the default.

-v

Setting this flag enables a verbose mode. scanspool will then print which newsgroup is currently worked upon. It will list all the articles found in non-active directories (that is to say articles sorted into groups no longer present in the active file), rather than just printing the group once.

DIAGNOSTICS¶

The output of scanspool will start with one of the following forms:

"FATAL:" (to stderr)

Fatal or internal error.

"WARNING:" (to stderr)

active or article format problem, newsgroup alias problem, find(1) error, article open error.

"path/123:" (to stdout)

Issues such as:

"\t ..." (to stdout)

Verbose messages start with a tab.

HISTORY¶

scanspool was written by Landon Curt Noll (chongo was here /\../\).

This manual page was written by Florian Schlichting, largely based on comments in the script.

SEE ALSO¶

active(5).