From: Stephen Hebditch <steveh@orbital.demon.co.uk>
Message-Id: <199212201840.AA07450@orbital.demon.co.uk>
Subject: slurp-1.03.tar.Z
To: uploads@demon.co.uk
Date: Sun, 20 Dec 1992 18:40:32 +0000 (GMT)
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                              SLURP V1.03
                              ===========

Slurp is an advanced passive NNTP client for UNIX. It will connect to a
remote NNTP server and retrieve articles in a specified set of Usenet
newsgroups that have arrived after a particular date (typically the
last time it was invoked) for processing by your local news system.

The Feature List.

- No restriction on the number of newsgroups that can be retrieved in a
  session. The client does a series of NEWNEWS requests if necessary to
  build up a list of articles which need to be retrieved from the
  server.

- Compatible with C News and INN.

- Greatly enhanced efficiency over nntpxfer. Large batches of articles
  are piped to rnews rather than individual articles, massively
  reducing the fork/exec overhead.

- Easy configuration.

  slurp.sys defines which groups you wish to get from which server in a
  similar way to the normal C News sys file, e.g.

	news.demon.co.uk:demon.*,!demon.msdos.announce,uk.*,\
	!uk.net.maps/world,uk

  slurp.tim contains the time to be used for the NEWNEWS request at
  each server.

  The newsgroups list, start time and distributions can be overridden
  on the command line. There are also command line settings to enable
  debugging output, prevent writing the time for the next NEWNEWS to
  slurp.tim and use the local time for the next NEWNEWS rather than the
  remote time.

- No lost articles due to unsynchronised clocks. By default, the time
  for the next NEWNEWS is set by a call to the tcp time service on the
  remote machine. This fixes a problem in nntpxfer where articles could
  be missed if the clock on the server is behind that on the client.

- Faster article throughput. If configured to do so, slurp stacks up
  the next article request before the current article is received,
  decreasing the total article transfer time by around 30%. This is
  most of use for people retrieving news over a dialup slip/ppp
  connection.

- Logging to syslog of the number of new, missing and duplicate
  articles at the end of a session plus, if required, the transfer
  speed of the article fetching stage.

- Independent of the NNTP 1.5.11 code.


Slurp was written in ANSI C under Dell's SVR4/386 but is reasonably
portable to most other modern versions of UNIX.

-- 
Stephen Hebditch  TQM Communications  steveh@orbital.demon.co.uk +44 836 825962