focal (5) history.5.gz

Provided by: inn2_2.6.3-3_amd64 bug

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)