Recbnews receives news sent as mail in bencode format (see newsbatch(8)), runs it through bdecode, and feeds it to rnews. Recpnews does likewise for news sent as mail with `N' prepended to each line.
Newsspool is the actual spooling program. It creates a spool file with a name based on the current time (which avoids the need for locking) in the spooling directory /usr/spool/news/in.coming and copies the input file(s) (standard input default) to it, stripping off any `#! cunbatch' or `#! c7unbatch' header as it does so. If invoked with the -i option, when finished it attempts to start newsrun to process the new news immediately.
Newsrun should be run periodically (e.g. by cron(8)) to process spooled news. Newsrunning can be used to enable and disable newsrun's processing if it is desired to avoid major news processing during certain hours.
Newsrun checks for the stop file that newsrunning off creates, verifies that there is enough disk space for processing, and then starts processing spooled news. Each batch is run through c7decode (if necessary), decompressed (if necessary), and then fed to relaynews (on the server, if /usr/lib/news/server exists and contains its name). If relaynews fails, newsrun reports this (by mail to usenet) and attempts to save the spooled batch in the bad subdirectory for human inspection. To bound the accumulation in bad in the event of some systematic problem, newsrun limits bad to 50 files; this default can be changed by placing a limit file in bad, containing one ASCII line with the desired numeric limit. A limit of 0 will prevent saving of bad batches.
C7decode passes standard input to standard output, decoding a complex and bizarre encoding of 8-bit data as printable ASCII characters. Bdecode passes standard input, or the file if there is one, to standard output, decoding the bencode encoding and stripping off debris prepended and appended by mailers.
(All in /usr/spool/news/in.coming) 000000000(etc.) spooled news stopnewsrun disable file baddirectory for failed news bad/limitlimit on number of files in bad
Recpnews and the protocol it uses are obsolescent, as recbnews and bdecode are far superior.