rawdog (1) - Linux Manuals

rawdog: an RSS Aggregator Without Delusions Of Grandeur

NAME

rawdog - an RSS Aggregator Without Delusions Of Grandeur

SYNOPSIS

rawdog [options]

DESCRIPTION

rawdog is a feed aggregator for Unix-like systems.

rawdog uses the Python feedparser module to retrieve articles from a number of feeds in RSS, Atom and other formats, and writes out a single HTML file, based on a template either provided by the user or generated by rawdog, containing the latest articles it's seen.

rawdog uses the ETags and Last-Modified headers to avoid fetching a file that hasn't changed, and supports gzip and delta compression to reduce bandwidth when it has. rawdog is configured from a simple text file; the only state kept between invocations that can't be reconstructed from the feeds is the ordering of articles.

OPTIONS

This program follows the usual GNU command line syntax, with long options starting with two dashes (`-').

General Options

-d DIR, --dir DIR

Use DIR instead of the $HOME/.rawdog directory. This option lets you have two or more rawdog setups with different configurations and sets of feeds.

-N, --no-locking

Do not lock the state file.

rawdog usually claims a lock on its state file, to stop more than one instance from running at the same time. Unfortunately, some filesystems don't support file locking; you can use this option to disable locking entirely if you're in that situation.

-v, --verbose

Print more detailed information about what rawdog is doing to stderr while it runs.

-V FILE, --log FILE

As with -V, but write the information to FILE.

-W, --no-lock-wait

Exit silently if the state file is already locked.

If the state file is already locked, rawdog will normally wait until it becomes available, then run. However, if you're got a lot of feeds and a slow network connection, you might prefer rawdog to just give up immediately if the previous instance is still running.

Actions

rawdog will perform these actions in the order given.

-a URL, --add URL

Try to find a feed associated with URL and add it to the config file.

URL may be a feed itself, or it can be an HTML page that links to a feed in any of a variety of ways. rawdog uses heuristics to pick the best feed it can find, and will complain if it can't find one.

-c FILE, --config FILE

Read FILE as an additional config file; any options provided in FILE will override those set in the main config file (with the exception of "feed", which is cumulative). FILE may be an absolute path or a path relative to your .rawdog directory.

Note that $HOME/.rawdog/config will still be read first even if you specify this option. -c is mostly useful when you want to write the same set of feeds out using two different sets of output options.

-f URL, --update-feed URL

Update the feed pointed to by URL immediately, even if its period hasn't elapsed since it was last updated. This is useful when you're publishing a feed yourself, and want to test whether it's working properly.

-l, --list

List brief information about each of the feeds that was known about at the time of the last update.

-r URL, --remove URL

Remove feed URL from the config file.

-s TEMPLATE, --show TEMPLATE

Print one of the templates currently in use to stdout. TEMPLATE may be page, item, feedlist or feeditem. This can be used as a starting point if you want to design your own template for use with the corresponding template option in the config file.

-u, --update

Fetch data from the feeds and store it. This could take some time if you've got lots of feeds.

-w, --write

Write out the HTML output file.

Special Actions

If one of these options is specified, rawdog will perform only that action, then exit.

--dump URL

Show what rawdog's feed parser returns for URL. This can be useful when trying to understand why rawdog doesn't display a feed correctly.

--help

Provide a brief summary of all the options rawdog supports.

EXAMPLES

rawdog is typically invoked from cron(1). The following crontab(5) entry would fetch data from feeds and write it to HTML once an hour, exiting if rawdog is already running:

0 * * * *  rawdog -Wuw

FILES

$HOME/.rawdog/config

AUTHOR

rawdog was mostly written by Adam Sampson <ats [at] offog.org>, with contributions and bug reports from many of rawdog's users. See rawdog's NEWS file for a complete list of contributors.

This manual page was originally written by Decklin Foster <decklin [at] red-bean.com>, for the Debian project (but may be used by others).