Linux -- User Communication -- Part-3 -- news command

The system administrator is the sole person who can make news under the Linux. He types the information which he wants everyone on the network to know of in different files in /var/lib/sysnews directory. 

Whenever we log in if any fresh news has come in since we logged out last time then a message is displayed on our terminal saying, news: appeal rally where appeal and rally are the names of files in which the news items are available. We may either choose to ignore it, or if any news item interests us we may decide to pursue the same.

• First, we can look at the names of the news articles by the command news with -n option. Similarly, to know the number of unread news articles that are present in the /var/lib/sysnews directory, we use the command news with -s option. If you try news -s after you have gone through all the news items it promtly displays the message "NEWS: 0 news articles".

• The command without any options would yield the list of unread news articles one after another.

• At the same time, the user can pursue only a particular news article  from several items by specifying the article name after the command. For example, if you want to pursue the article named appeal, then you can run the command at the prompt as news appeal. 

• If the user decided to pursue all the news articles (read and unread), then the option -a has to be used with the command.