1HISTORY(5) InterNetNews Documentation HISTORY(5)
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6 history - Record of current and recently expired Usenet articles
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9 The file pathdb/history keeps a record of all articles currently stored
10 in the news system, as well as those that have been received but since
11 expired. In a typical production environment, this file will be many
12 megabytes.
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14 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 appends a new line
17 each time it files an article, and expire builds a new version of the
18 file by removing old articles and purging old entries.
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20 Each line consists of two or three fields separated by a tab, shown
21 below as " \t ":
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23 [hash] \t date
24 [hash] \t date \t @token@
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26 The hash field is the ASCII representation of the hash of the Message-
27 ID. This is directly used for the key of the dbz.
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29 The date field consists of three sub-fields separated by a tilde. All
30 sub-fields are the text representation of the number of seconds since
31 the epoch, that is to say a time_t like in gettimeofday(2). The first
32 sub-field is the article's arrival date. If copies of the article are
33 still present, then the second sub-field is either the value of the
34 article's Expires header field, or a hyphen if no expiration date was
35 specified. If an article has been expired, then the second sub-field
36 will be a hyphen. The third sub-field is the value of the article's
37 Date header field, recording when the article was posted.
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39 The token field is a token of the article. This field is empty if the
40 article has been expired.
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42 For example, an article whose Message-ID was
43 <7q2saq$sal$1@isrv4.pa.vix.com>, posted on 26 Aug 1999 08:02:34 GMT and
44 received at 26 Aug 1999 08:06:54 GMT, could have a history line (broken
45 into three lines for display) like the following:
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47 [E6184A5BC2898A35A3140B149DE91D5C] \t
48 935678987~-~935678821 \t
49 @030154574F00000000000007CE3B000004BA@
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51 In addition to the text file, there is a dbz database associated with
52 the file that uses the Message-ID field as a key to determine the
53 offset in the text file where the associated line begins. For
54 historical reasons, the key includes the trailing "\0" byte (which is
55 not stored in the text file).
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58 Written by Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews. Rewritten
59 into POD by Julien Elie.
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62 expire(8), inn.conf(5), innd(8), libinn_dbz(3), makehistory(8).
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66INN 2.7.0 2022-07-10 HISTORY(5)