• What is the pcp?
• Where can I get the pcp from?
• How can I use the pcp?
• Is there a copyright on pcp?

What

 ... is the pcp? pcp stands for Perl Cron-Poster and is a short but nice perl-script that allows you to set up a cronjob for regular postings (like FAQs and stuff). I wrote it for myself for the miniFAQ-Posting for the Newsgroup at.linux. But I'm quite sure that it will be helpful to all the others out there that have the same problem.

Where

 ... can you get the pcp from? Well, from here :-) It is a plain text file and not very big so I refused from packing it (it wouldn't help you much). Also notice that there is no version-control here at the moment. This will change in the future, I hope ;)

How

 ... can you use the pcp? Well, that's a little difficult to say for the development isn't quite straitforward and the pcp can (and will!) change in several ways (to make it easier to configure, first of all :)
 So at the moment there are the following sugguestions for you:

• Generated MID: You will have to change the MID (line 26).
• Old MID-File: The path to the old MID-File needs to be changed, too (line 27).
• Message: The message has to be change (line 55ff).

 If you speak perl it should be no problem at all for you. But it shouldn't be too hard to understand even if you don't know perl.

 However, there are several restrictions to the program: You shouldn't trust it too much. It might misfunction if you change some bits on the wrong place or set up your cron-job wrong. You might end up posting tons of messages to the groups (or even others, if you are not careful). You are on your own then - I take no responsibility for the program. In more general words: The warranty-paragraph of the GPL applies to this piece of code!

 If you want to use this piece of code for commercial postings beware that they are not allowed everywhere. Even if you don't you have to notice to not post too often and/or in too many groups (this also applies for commercial usage, of course ;). If you want to post to a group check first for the rules for that group or you might get into serious troubles.
 If you get into troubles - don't blame pcp for it. You did set it up to do the things it does, right? So first search for the reason at your part of the end.

Copyright

 ..., there is a copyright to this piece of crap? Well, yes. Like every piece of intelectual work even this short hack has a copyright. It goes to me, Gerfried Fuchs. I am the intelectual owner of the code. To become a little more serious, the copyright that applies to this program goes like this:

  pcp - Perl Cron-Poster: a short perlprogram that helps you posting ..
  Copyright (C) 2000 by Gerfried Fuchs                .. FAQ's and stuff

  This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
  the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
  (at your option) any later version.

  This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
  but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
  GNU General Public License for more details.

  You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
  along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
  Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA
  

 Especially, I take no responsibility for anything this program does. If it doesn't work for you, if you think it works in a wrong way, or even if it does any harm to anyone or anything I am not responsible for that - you used it, you are responsible. This might sound hard but noone said that life is easy, right? :-P

So far, so good...

 What else is to do? Well, there are several things that I planed:

• Reading the message from a seperate file
• Making the setup easier (commandline-options, ...)
• cron-interface
• plausibility-check for old MID
• (fill in your own ideas)

 So, as said before - if you have any sugguestions to make I'd pleased to hear of them so drop me an email.