1HISTORY(5) File Formats Manual HISTORY(5)
2
6 history - record of current and recently expired Usenet articles
7
9 The file <pathdb in inn.conf>/history keeps a record of all articles
10 currently stored in the news system, as well as those that have been
11 received but since expired. In a typical production environment, this
12 file will be many megabytes.
13 The file consists of text lines. Each line corresponds to one article.
15 The file is normally kept sorted in the order in which articles are
16 received, although this is not a requirement. Innd(8) appends a new
17 line each time it files an article, and expire(8) builds a new version
18 of the file by removing old articles and purging old entries.
19 Each line consists of two or three fields separated by a tab, shown
21 below as \t:
22 [Hash] \t date
23 [Hash] \t date \t token
24 The Hash field is the ASCII representation of the hash of the Message-
26 ID header. This is directly used for the key of the dbz(3).
27 The date field consists of three sub-fields separated by a tilde. All
29 sub-fields are the text representation of the number of seconds since
30 the epoch — i.e., a time_t; see gettimeofday(2). The first sub-field
31 is the article's arrival date. If copies of the article are still
32 present then the second sub-field is either the value of the article's
33 Expires header, or a hyphen if no expiration date was specified. If an
34 article has been expired then the second sub-field will be a hyphen.
35 The third sub-field is the value of the article's Date header, record‐
36 ing when the article was posted.
37 The token field is a token of the article. This field is empty if the
39 article has been expired.
40 For example, an article whose Message-ID was
42 <7q2saq$sal$1@isrv4.pa.vix.com>, posted on 26 Aug 1999 08:02:34 GMT and
43 received at 26 Aug 1999 08:06:54 GMT, could have a history line (broken
44 into three lines for display) like the following:
45 [E6184A5BC2898A35A3140B149DE91D5C] \t
46 935678987~-~935678821 \t
47 @030154574F00000000000007CE3B000004BA@
48 In addition to the text file, there is a dbz(3) database associated
50 with the file that uses the Message-ID field as a key to determine the
51 offset in the text file where the associated line begins. For histori‐
52 cal reasons, the key includes the trailing \0 byte (which is not stored
53 in the text file).
54
56 Written by Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews. This is
57 revision 10283, dated 2018-05-14.
58
60 dbz(3), expire(8), inn.conf(5), innd(8), makehistory(8).
61 HISTORY(5)