NAME

       snprimedb - feed the sn database.

SYNOPSIS

       snprimedb [-i] (no arguments)

DESCRIPTION

       snprimedb  reads  records  from  its  standard  input and enters them into the database.  The database is
       appended  to;  if  you  want  to  start  a  new  database,  you   would   delete   the   database   files
       .chain, .table, .newsgroup before running this program.

       The  main  purpose  of  snprimedb is to rebuild the ID database.  Then its input is usually obtained from
       snscan.

       If the option -i is given, simply initialize the database files if they do not exist, and exit.

       Input lines are of the format
       newsgroup id serial where newsgroup is the newsgroup the article may be found in, id is its  message  id,
       and  serial  is  the  local serial number of that article in that newsgroup.  If newsgroup is the special
       name =junk, then the whole line is ignored.

       You will need to be root or the owner of /var/spool/sn to do this.

BUGS

       snprimedb does not check to see that the articles really exist.  Also the size of the hash table is fixed
       at compile time.

       Under degenerate conditions, the hash table file .chain (see below) could grow very large, with reclaimed
       space remaining unused.  This is due to the very simple file space allocator, which doesn't know  how  to
       coalesce  adjacent free areas.  It doesn't know how to split them either.  The allocator assumes that the
       shape of the distribution of record lengths remains quite constant over time.

       The hash table database doesn't make any attempt to reduce its footprint.   This  should  be  acceptable,
       since the database is shared.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

       SNROOT If  this  is  set  and is not empty, the value is used in place of /var/spool/sn, the default news
              spool directory.

FILES

       /var/spool/sn/.table
              snprimedb uses this file as the index of the hash table, and ...

       /var/spool/sn/.chain
              as the hash chains, and ...

       /var/spool/sn/.newsgroup
              to attach an integer identifier to each newsgroup name.  This file is a human-readable  flat  text
              file.