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 arti­
       cle'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 recieved 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

       includes the trailing \0 byte (which is not stored in  the
       text file).


HISTORY

       Written  by  Rich  $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNet­
       News.  This is revision 1.12.2.1, dated 2000/08/17.


SEE ALSO

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


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