NNTP spec supports this command for you get a list of article numbers received after a given time point:

NEWNEWS newsgroups date time [GMT] [<distribution>]
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In your Perl script, just do something like:

require News::NNTPClient;
 
  $c = new News::NNTPClient;
 
  foreach ($c->newnews("test", time - 3600)) {
      print $c->body($_);
  }
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You either run your script as a daemon, or use whatever scheduler you have to schedule it to run periodically.

Update:

If the news group you are trying to access falls in liz's description, then you have to remember the number of the last article, and next time, just start from there. Remember one thing, article number are not neccessary continuous, and your script has to expet this.

Unfortunately, I haven't seen any NNTP server that supports this (at least not in the past 5 years). Most ISP's have switched this off because it causes too much load on the NNTP server. ;-(

Liz

(I'm not sure I fully understood the question -- more context would be welcome...)

You could schedule it with your OS (e.g. a cron job, or using putting in a .bat file and using task-scheduler on Win32). Or you could start the program manually and use it in a loop like this:

my $n = 10 * 60;
while (1) {
      sleep $n; # sleep 10 minutes
      # do your stuff to get and parse newsgroup stuff
      }
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Here is the code that I am using.. I try to go with Newsrc file. I think it's the best option.

use News::NNTPClient;
use News::Newsrc;
use strict;
use warnings;

my $newsrc = News::Newsrc->new("localfile");
my $ok = $newsrc->load("localfile");

my $server = 'myserver';
my $group = q(group);
my $client = News::NNTPClient->new($server)
my ($low,$high) = $client->group($group);
my @unmarked = $newsrc->unmarked_articles($group,$low,$high);
foreach my $artnum (@unmarked){
    my $art = $client->article($artnum) or next;
    print $art,"\n";
    $newsrc->mark($group,$artnum);
}
$newsrc->save_as("localfile")
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