bionic (5) history.5.gz

Provided by: inn_1.7.2q-45build2_amd64 bug

NAME

       history - record of current and recently expired Usenet articles

DESCRIPTION

       The  file  /var/lib/news/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:
              <Message-ID>   \t   date
              <Message-ID>   \t   date   \t   files

       The Message-ID field is the value of the article's Message-ID header, including the angle brackets.

       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  files field is a set of entries separated by one or more spaces.  Each entry consists of the name of
       the newsgroup, a slash, and the article number.  This field is empty if the article has been expired.

       For example, an article cross-posted to comp.sources.unix and comp.sources.d that was posted on  February
       10, 1991 (and received three minutes later), with an expiration date of May 5, 1991, could have a history
       line (broken into two lines for display) like the following:
              <312@litchi.foo.com>  \t  666162000~673329600~666162180  \t
                  comp.sources.unix/1104 comp.sources.d/7056

       In addition to the text file, there is a dbz(3z) 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, dated 1996/09/06.

SEE ALSO

       dbz(3z), expire(8), innd(8), news-recovery(8).

                                                                                                      HISTORY(5)