NAME

       history - record of current and recently expired Usenet articles

DESCRIPTION

       The file /var/lib/news/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:
              <Message-ID>   \t   date
              <Message-ID>   \t   date   \t   files

       The Message-ID field is the value of the article's Message-ID header, including the  angle
       brackets.

       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  files field is a set of entries separated by one or more spaces.  Each entry consists
       of the name of the newsgroup, a slash, and the article number.  This field is empty if the
       article has been expired.

       For  example,  an  article  cross-posted  to comp.sources.unix and comp.sources.d that was
       posted on February 10, 1991 (and received three minutes later), with an expiration date of
       May  5,  1991,  could  have  a  history  line (broken into two lines for display) like the
       following:
              <312@litchi.foo.com>  \t  666162000~673329600~666162180  \t
                  comp.sources.unix/1104 comp.sources.d/7056

       In addition to the text file, there is a dbz(3z) 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 1.12, dated
       1996/09/06.

SEE ALSO

       dbz(3z), expire(8), innd(8), news-recovery(8).

                                                                                       HISTORY(5)