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.