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Tellnews commands

Send commands to


Set a selection of groups specified by a wild card to 'cached' this means dnews will attemp to suck these groups from your upstream site. It will also set the number of days to cache the groups on the server.

Groups: Days


Scan buckets and find any missing ones


Correct group ranges "from" "to" and "number" of items based on the information in the master index, this will take up to 2 minutes.


Process a set text file as if it had been recieved as a checkgroups control message, the file should have the normal headers and must be placed in the CONFIG directory.

File Name:


Copy a newsgroup, this is only intended for local news groups. The new newsgroup must already exist.


Old Group name:
New Group name:


Clears some of the internal caches used for reading item files.


Used with loglvl debug or flush, to control which debugging messages are sent to the log file. The list of options must not contain spaces.

Debug information to send to log file:


Used by the dnews admin to disconnect a single channel, select the number 'n' by doing a tellnews status command

Channel to disonnect:


Show approximate disk use of specified groups

NewsGroup or Wild card


Clear cache of ip names/numbers


Show ip names/numbers in cache


Closedown the daemon cleanly


Run the expire process


Check the active.names file and repair


Reset the active.times file to n days ago

Number of days:


Get any new groups from that suck feed

Number of suck feed to check for new groups


Get the active.names from our feeder


Get older news from the feeder

NewsGroup or Wild card number of days


Age all groups one day


Merge active.add into active.dat


Remove duplicate groups in the active file


Enter your registration key

Key to enter:


Actually delete group from active.dat if empty

Group to remove:


killitem grpname num Delete a specific item and cross posts

Group name: Item number:

killitem "<message_id>" Delete by message id, enter the message id in the group field above and leave the number empty


Delete a specific item

Group name: Item number:


Display last 50 lines of log file


Create file chan_n.log for channel [n]

log channel number:


Set debug level on the fly

Set loglvl to:


Delete groups that don't match ME feed


Add and remove groups to match the place we suck from


name y|m creator desc Add a new group

Name: normal/moderated (y|m)

Creator: Description:


Remove groups marked as deleted


Scan db for items not in the history file


Delete db index and rebuild from item files, takes hours


Send articles again, to create fts index


Reject a specific item from Ihave feed


Reload news.conf ...


Get a new fts index from disk


Removes items not in history (medium speed)


EMail status to manager


Requeue builtin feeds


(ONLY FOR NEW SYSTEMS) Clears ALL item numbers


Mark group as deleted

NewsGroup or Wild card


Rotate the .log files


Set Megabytes used


Process a text file as if it had been recieved as a checkgroups control message, the file should have the normal headers and must be placed in the CONFIG directory.

NewsGroup or Wild card


Show mem use in detail


Show the contents of the update queue


Show users who have been connected and stats


Show how fast articles are arriving


Reset the counters used above


THROWS AWAY ARTICLES - TESTING ONLY


Show statistics on groups since startup


Show statistics on incoming news since last expire


Show statistics on outgoing feeds


Show what server is doing


Test access.conf entries

Domain/IP Number: Username:

Password:


Check number of file handles available


Check how much mem dnews can allocate


Lock up Dnews for n seconds


Check how many sockets dnews can open


trimgroups n Delete groups not on upstream site

Number to trim:


Set a group to uncached

NewsGroup or Wild card


Mark deleted groups as normal again

NewsGroup or Wild card


Start a suck update


Clear current update queue


updateone wild [n] Get matching cached groups from suck n

NewsGroup or Wild card Suck #


Send an undocumented tellnews command