WHAT IS BRAG? ============= Brag collects and assembles multipart binary attachements from newsgroups. This is a robust command-line tool, well suited to run as a cron job. FEATURES ======== * Collects and downloads multipart binary attachements * Supported encodings: uuencode, MIME base64 and yenc * Filters messages using accept/reject patterns * Optionally saves message subjects * Supports NNTP authentication * Supports non-default NNTP ports * Can combine parts from different newsgroups or even different servers * Bulletproof: Restarts from the last successful operation, handles network errors and disk-full situations gracefully * Very fast: can utilize multiple parallel connections to server WHERE TO GET IT =============== Brag is available from http://brag.sourceforge.net/ or http://www.akos.uklinux.net/brag The project is maintained at SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=3998 TIPS AND TRICKS =============== Speed it up! ------------ If you have a fast network, you might want to tune the number of connections to the news server, using the -t option. The default value is 2. If you have a DSL line or better, we recommend to set it to 4 or more. Running brag as a cron job -------------------------- Here is a sample crontab for brag. It runs brag once a day, plus cleans up unfinished parts older than one week: 30 1 * * * brag -q -s news.myisp.com -g my.favorit.group 30 2 * * * find ~/.brag -name '[0-9]*' -type d -mtime +7 | xargs rm -rf Reconnecting after network errors --------------------------------- Brag terminates with exit code 2 in case of network problems. Here is a sample script which attempts to reconnect twice after a network error: #/bin/sh for i in 1 2 3; do brag -s news.myisp.com -g my.favorit.group [ $? != 2 ] && break sleep 60 done SUGGESTIONS AND BUG REPORTS =========================== Send them to the author Akos Polster: akos@pipacs.com ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ================ Neil D. McKay : Wrote the original NNTP extension used in Brag James T. Perkins , Robert Harrah : Support for news servers not maintaining an internal message counter Julio Sánchez Fernández : Performance improvements and support for yenc encoded messages King Rhoton : Huge performance improvements utilizing multiple server connections Jari Lehtonen : Max OS X 10.3 fixes joules@gorfajn.com: Limit number of messages to download Simon Kelley : Debian fixes Dr. Craig Hollabaugh , Gantert, John P. , Trevor Phillips , Rick , Mike Manchester , Jason Hobbs , Michael Glauche , Kevin Stanchfield , Holger Pfaff , Antti-Veikko Rosti , Jim , Anders Hedberg , Claas Langbehn : Bug reports and suggestions