The Info program allows posting of information to the general user community. The permissions of the Info directory (commonly /user/Info or /afs/fnal/products/Info) determine which users can submit, delete, and purge articles.
Included with the Info product is the infoschlep script which is the tool for posting news articles to Info.
Info provides a number of different command line arguments in order to add, display, delete, etc. articles. The following text documents the Info options
Info may take any one of the following arguments as requests:
-help requests this help text
tag(s) requests presentation of selected articles by tag
-display tag(s) requests presentation of selected articles by tag
-anynew requests message about number of new articles
-any requests message about number of articles
-anynewcode requests exit status about number of new articles
-anycode requests exit status about number of articles
-new requests list of new articles
-list requests list of articles
-add requests prompting to add new article from text file
-replace requests prompting to replace existing article from text file
-insert requests prompting to insert article from text file
-Add tag headline expiredate textfile
-Replace tag headline expiredate textfile
-Insert tag headline expiredate textfile
requests corresponding batch operation
-del requests the removal of a specific article by tag
-delete requests the removal of a specific article by tag
-del tag requests the removal of a specific article by tag
-delete tag requests the removal of a specific article by tag
-purge requests the removal of expired articles
If none of the above are supplied, the default is -list.
- A tag is a short (1 to 20 character) article identifier.
- A headline is a short (1 to 32 character) description of
the contents.
- An expire date is a date (see getdate), 'standard' (or 'std'),
or 'never'.
- The expiration date can not be earlier than today.
- A text file is an existing readable file from which the text
for an article is to be copied.
A new article has a time stamp newer than your $HOME/.Info file. If you do not have a $HOME/.Info file then all articles are new.
The article modification operations (-add, -replace, -insert, -Add, -Replace, -Insert -delete and -purge) requires that you have permission to change the Info directory.
When adding an article (through Info -add) the user is prompted for the additional information required. This information includes article name, article headline, and expiration date. The expiration date can be added in a number of formats. For a complete description of valid formats, see the documentation for getdate(DCD3.4).
In order to purge articles, it is suggested that a cron job be setup for an account that has write permission in the Info directory. The following cron job would purge articles once a week early Sunday morning.
05 01 * * 0 /usr/local/bin/Info -purge