HISTORY(5)HISTORY(5)NAMEhistory - record of current and recently expired Usenet
articles
DESCRIPTION
The file <pathdb in inn.conf>/history keeps a record of
all articles currently stored in the news system, as well
as those that have been received but since expired. In a
typical production environment, this file will be many
megabytes.
The file consists of text lines. Each line corresponds to
one article. The file is normally kept sorted in the
order in which articles are received, although this is not
a requirement. Innd(8) appends a new line each time it
files an article, and expire(8) builds a new version of
the file by removing old articles and purging old entries.
Each line consists of two or three fields separated by a
tab, shown below as \t:
[Hash] \t date
[Hash] \t date \t token
The Hash field is the ASCII representation of the hash of
the Message-ID header. This is directly used for the key
of the dbz(3).
The date field consists of three sub-fields separated by a
tilde. All sub-fields are the text representation of the
number of seconds since the epoch -- i.e., a time_t; see
gettimeofday(2). The first sub-field is the article's
arrival date. If copies of the article are still present
then the second sub-field is either the value of the arti
cle's Expires header, or a hyphen if no expiration date
was specified. If an article has been expired then the
second sub-field will be a hyphen. The third sub-field is
the value of the article's Date header, recording when the
article was posted.
The token field is a token of the article. This field is
empty if the article has been expired.
For example, an article whose Message-ID was
<7q2saq$sal$1@isrv4.pa.vix.com>, posted on 26 Aug 1999
08:02:34 GMT and recieved at 26 Aug 1999 08:06:54 GMT,
could have a history line (broken into three lines for
display) like the following:
[E6184A5BC2898A35A3140B149DE91D5C] \t
935678987~-~935678821 \t
@030154574F00000000000007CE3B000004BA@
In addition to the text file, there is a dbz(3) database
associated with the file that uses the Message-ID field as
a key to determine the offset in the text file where the
associated line begins. For historical reasons, the key
includes the trailing \0 byte (which is not stored in the
text file).
HISTORY
Written by Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNet
News. This is revision 1.12.2.1, dated 2000/08/17.
SEE ALSOdbz(3), expire(8), inn.conf(5), innd(8), makehistory(8).
HISTORY(5)
