4 history \- record of current and recently expired Usenet articles
7 .I <pathdb in inn.conf>/history
8 keeps a record of all articles currently stored in the news system,
9 as well as those that have been received but since expired.
10 In a typical production environment, this file will be many megabytes.
12 The file consists of text lines.
13 Each line corresponds to one article.
14 The file is normally kept sorted in the order in which articles are
15 received, although this is not a requirement.
17 appends a new line each time it files an article, and
19 builds a new version of the file by removing old articles and purging
22 Each line consists of two or three fields separated by a tab, shown below
28 [Hash] \et date \et token
34 field is the ASCII representation of the hash of the Message-ID header.
35 This is directly used for the key of the
40 field consists of three sub-fields separated by a tilde.
41 All sub-fields are the text representation of the number of seconds since
48 The first sub-field is the article's arrival date.
49 If copies of the article are still present then the second sub-field is
50 either the value of the article's Expires header, or a hyphen if no
51 expiration date was specified.
52 If an article has been expired then the second sub-field will be a hyphen.
53 The third sub-field is the value of the article's Date header, recording
54 when the article was posted.
58 field is a token of the article.
59 This field is empty if the article has been expired.
61 For example, an article whose Message-ID was
62 <7q2saq$sal$1@isrv4.pa.vix.com>, posted on 26 Aug 1999 08:02:34 GMT and
63 recieved at 26 Aug 1999 08:06:54 GMT, could have a
64 history line (broken into three lines for display) like the
68 [E6184A5BC2898A35A3140B149DE91D5C] \et
69 935678987~-~935678821 \et
70 @030154574F00000000000007CE3B000004BA@
74 In addition to the text file, there is a
76 database associated with the file that uses the Message-ID field as a key
77 to determine the offset in the text file where the associated line begins.
78 For historical reasons, the key includes the trailing \e0 byte
79 (which is not stored in the text file).
81 Written by Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews.
83 This is revision \\$3, dated \\$4.
85 .R$ $Id: history.5 3782 2000-08-17 13:30:18Z kondou $