These perl scripts add several useful URL protocols and/or extensions thereof to chimera. news.pl Allows reading of news in several modes: news://server/ List groups news://server/group List articles in group news://server/group/number Read Article by number news://server/messageID Read Article by message ID Articles are formatted with URLs converted to links, including mailto and news URLs where possible. The last two can also have news posting or mail reply forms created by appending: ?post To follow up ?post+include To follow up and quote ?mail To reply via email ?mail+include To reply via email These forms call postto.pl and mailto.pl to do the actual distribution. postto.pl mailto.pl These are nearly identical, save that mailto uses sendmail while postto connects directly to the NNTP server. When called with a GET command (usually anywhere but a form), these scripts return an HTML form to post a new thread to a newsgroup or mail a letter to an address. The URLs are: postto:news.group mailto:person@some.where (Note that the latter can instead launch your favorite mail program if you set the MAIL_CLIENT environment variable ... the author uses "xterm -e pine") When called with a POST command (as in the forms generated by news.pl), the URL is: postto://server mailto://server (Though in fact the server is disregarded by mailto) The scripts expect four fields from the forms, HEAD, BODY, SIG and SIGN. The first three are text fields, and the fourth is a toggle indicating whether or not to append the SIG text to the message. Failed POST requests are stored in dead.letter or dead.article as appropriate. finger.pl Just here for giggles. The URL is: finger:person@some.where show.pl Debugging tool. Useful to see if the request you are sending is what you think it is. The following lines need to be added to your protocol file (or to your personal ~/.chimera_protocol): news /usr/lib/X11/chimera/nntp.pl mailto /usr/lib/X11/chimera/mailto.pl postto /usr/lib/X11/chimera/postto.pl finger /usr/lib/X11/chimera/finger.pl show /usr/lib/X11/chimera/show.pl (or wherever you put them) They all assume perl is in /usr/bin. Sendmail is assumed to be in /usr/lib.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE correct the default nntp server in news.pl and postto.pl It won't accept calls from off campus anyway, so don't waste our bandwidth
Variables Available to Customize the news.pl, mailto.pl and postto.pl set ========================================== MAIL_CLIENT Preferred mailto:address client (I use xterm -e pine) USER Login Name NAME Full Name HOME Home Directory HOSTNAME Name of current machine NNTPSERVER Default NNTP Server QUOTECHAR Leading Character(s) to indicate quoted text NEWSORG Organization ORGANIZATION Organization, if NEWSORG unset SIGNATURE Location of .signature file, or text of signature REPLYTO Address to direct replies to The following allow customization of the headers and attribution text a la trn: NEWSHEADER Format of Header on News Articles ATTRIB Leading line for quotations in news MAILHEADER Format of Header on Mail replies YOUSAID Leading line for quotations in Mail The above four can contain the following special characters, which are translated as follows (matches trn header definitions): %C Current Newsgoup (in dot form) %n Newsgroups list of current article %s Subject of Article, stripped of all Re:'s %R Reference list including current article %o Organization Name %N Full Name %L Login %H Current machine's full name %f Reply-To or From line of current article %i Message-ID of current article, <>'s guaranteed
Enjoy! Michael Kellen <kellen@physics.montana.edu>