HISTORY(5)							File Formats Manual							HISTORY(5)

NAME

       history - record of current and recently expired Usenet articles

DESCRIPTION

       The file /var/lib/news/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 	:
	      <Message-ID>   	   date
	      <Message-ID>   	   date	 	   files

       The Message-ID field is the value of the article's Message-ID header, including the angle brackets.

       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  speci-
       fied.   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 files field is a set of entries separated by one or more spaces.  Each entry consists of the name of the newsgroup, a  slash,  and  the
       article number.	This field is empty if the article has been expired.

       For  example, an article cross-posted to comp.sources.unix and comp.sources.d that was posted on February 10, 1991 (and received three min-
       utes later), with an expiration date of May 5, 1991, could have a history line (broken into two lines for display) like the following:
	      <312@litchi.foo.com>  		666162000~673329600~666162180  	
		  comp.sources.unix/1104 comp.sources.d/7056

       In addition to the text file, there is a dbz(3z) 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  byte (which is not
       stored in the text file).

HISTORY

       Written by Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews.  This is revision 1.12, dated 1996/09/06.

SEE ALSO

       dbz(3z), expire(8), innd(8), news-recovery(8).

																	HISTORY(5)