[Techtalk] Re: scheduling a newsreader

[Almut Behrens]

On Fri, Aug 13, 2004 at 10:40:08AM +0100, James wrote:
> On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 19:14:56 -0400, aec wrote:
> >
> >It could be a command line reader too which is fine, as long as
> >I can say, "flag these headers, go get them at midnight" or
> >similar.
> 
> (...)
> If you can get your newsreader to download from the command line
> without user intervention, you can put that command in cron instead -
> but I don't know of any with that feature off-hand...


You might want to look into nget (http://nget.sourceforge.net/)
(which is just a commandline tool to retrieve news, not a reader).

Using the option -R you can tell it which individual message(s) to
download (and decode), e.g. by matching MessageIDs.  Note that the
expressions have to be specified in postfix syntax (as compared to
"infix", not the MTA) -- see the manpage for details.

Depending on how many messages you want to schedule for downloading,
the cut-n-pasting of the MessageIDs to some script file (which you're
then going to run via cron after midnight), might become a little
wearisome...  but still better than nothing -- until someone else comes
up with a more attractive solution :)

Good luck,
Almut