Nuzer
Contents:
Purpose
Objectives
Dependencies
Related Projects
Code
Usage
A secure fast MIME/uuencode decoder that scans newsgroups for binaries and fetches them.
- Unattended operation
- Secure (uuencode ';rm -rf /;' won't work)
- MIME base64 encoding and uuencode
- Support multipart articles, find incomplete articles
- Support incremental decoding (e.g. when run in hourly "sessions")
- Understand cross-posting
- Network efficient
- Client side
-
Any system with a POSIX-compliant filesystem (including hard links),
TCP/IP support, and capable of running Perl should work. The Perl
code for decoding uuencode and base64 is quite slow.
- Server side
- Requires the XOVER extension and probably depends on a number of
INN-specific features. Relies on XOVER database for network bandwidth
efficiency. If the news server generates XOVER data on the fly then
the client will be comparable in speed with non-enhanced news decoder
programs such as aub. Only tested with INN.
aub inspired me to write this program, i.e. it was beyond saving.
uudeview is much better known but nuzer came first.
The idea of automated newsgroup binary decoding is as old as file attachments in news articles. This is nothing new.
nuzer Perl script.
nuzer history-file 'alt.binaries.*' '!*pictures*'
The "history-file" argument contains nuzer's incremental download history
database. It lists message-ID's of articles that it has successfully
decoded or that contain no encoded binary data. The remaining arguments
are newsgroup pattern specifiers that select newsgroups to decode
articles from. Articles are decoded in the current directory with
directory names based on newsgroup names. Cross-posted binaries are
hard-linked to all relevant directories when decoded. Patterns that
start with '!' are negative-matching patterns. In the example, binaries
are fetched from any newsgroup name starting with "alt.binaries." and
not containing the word "pictures".