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HISTORY(5)


NAME

  history - 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 article'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 InterNetNews.  This is
  revision 1.12.2.1, dated 2000/08/17.


SEE ALSO

  dbz(3), expire(8), inn.conf(5), innd(8), makehistory(8).

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