RAWDOG(1)                  OpenBSD Reference Manual                  RAWDOG(1)



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

SEE ALSO
       cron(1).

AUTHOR
       rawdog was mostly written by Adam Sampson <ats@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@red-bean.com>, for the Debian project (but may be used by
       others).



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