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 received 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 10283, dated 2018-05-14.

SEE ALSO

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

                                                                                                      HISTORY(5)