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NAME

       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  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 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  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 3782, dated 2000-08-17.

SEE ALSO

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