NAME

       history - Record of current and recently expired Usenet articles

DESCRIPTION

       The file pathdb/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 appends a new line each time it files an article, and expire 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.  This is
       directly used for the key of the dbz.

       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, that is to say a time_t like
       in 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 field, 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 field, 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 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.  Rewritten into POD by Julien
       Elie.

SEE ALSO

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