
 SuckNews 1.02 - a simple NNTP fetcher
 Copyright (C) 2000 Robert Kerr <rkerr@go.to>


 This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the
 Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your
 option) any later version.

 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
 WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
 or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for
 more details.

 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
 with this program; if not, write to the Free Software  Foundation, Inc., 59
 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA


 SuckNews fetches news from an NNTP server, it can fetch whole articles or 
 just the header/body (specify -a, -b or -h on the commandline). A further 
 option is -x which will fetch the few headers available via XOVER and the 
 article body, this should be as fast as -b, ie quicker than -a. Fetched news
 items are written to stdout, separated by .\n, status info is written to
 stderr, so you can pipe stdout to a file or other program and still get
 status info. SuckNews uses a file called groups in the current directory to
 determine what groups to fetch and what the last fetched article in each
 group was. The format of this file is simply -
      <group name> <number of last fetched article>
 eg.
      comp.sys.acorn.programmer 39855
 At the beginning of each fetch this file will be copied to groups.old and
 as each group is fetched a fresh groups file, with an updated last article
 count for each group will be written. If there is no groups file sucknews
 will most likely fall over messily complaining about being unable to rename
 groups to groups.old.
 
 At current there is no support for adding a newsgroup if you don't know the 
 number of the last article you have fetched, read it from the groups file of
 some other fetcher or telnet in and get it yourself.
 
 The commandline options are -
 
 sucknews.py [-a] [-b] [-h] [-x] <news server>
 
 You may only use one of -a -b -h and -x if neither is specified -a is
 assumed.

 SuckNews has been tested on RISC OS and linux, it ought to work on any 
 system that has a python interpreter

