OVERCHAN(8)

NAME
       overchan - update the news overview database

SYNOPSIS
       overchan [ -D dir ] [ -c ] [ file...  ]

DESCRIPTION
       Overchan  reads  article data from files or standard input
       if none are specified.  (A single dash in  the  file  list
       means  to  read standard input.)  It uses this information
       to  update  the  news  overview  database.   Overchan   is
       designed to be used by InterNetNews or the C News ``mkov''
       packages to update the database as the articles  come  in.
       The  database for each newsgroup is stored in a file named
       .overview in a newsgroup  directory  within  the  overview
       database tree.

       Overchan  locks the database file (by locking an auxiliary
       file) before appending the new data.  To purge data  after
       articles have been expired, see expireover(8).

       By  default,  overchan  processes  its  input  as  an  INN
       overview stream written as a ``WO''  entry  in  the  news-
       feeds(5) file, for example:
              overview:*:Tc,WO:/usr/lib/news/bin/overchan

       This  data  consists of a line of text, separated into two
       parts by a tab.  The first part is a list of all  relative
       pathnames  where the article has been written, with a sin-
       gle space between entries.  The second part is the data to
       be written into the overview file, except that the initial
       article number is omitted.  The data in the overview files
       should  be expired by running expireover(8).  This is nor-
       mally done  by  adding  the  ``expireover''  flag  to  the
       news.daily(8) invocation.

OPTIONS
       -c     To  process  the output of the mkov(8) program, use
              the ``-c'' flag.  This format is described  in  the
              ``nov'' distribution.

       -D     The  ``-D''  flag  can be used to specify where the
              databases are stored.   The  default  directory  is
              /var/spool/news/over.view.

HISTORY
       Written  by  Rob  Robertson  lt;rob@violet.berkeley.edu and
       Rich $alz lt;rsalz@uunet.uu.net for InterNetNews.  This  is
       revision 1.9, dated 1996/10/29.

SEE ALSO
       expireover(8) news.daily(8) newsfeeds(5) 
       newsoverview(5) newsoverview(8).