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.\"
.IX Title "HISTORY 5"
.TH HISTORY 5 "2026-07-17" "INN 2.8.0" "InterNetNews Documentation"
.\" For nroff, turn off justification.  Always turn off hyphenation; it makes
.\" way too many mistakes in technical documents.
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.nh
.SH "NAME"
history \- Record of current and recently expired Usenet articles
.SH "DESCRIPTION"
.IX Header "DESCRIPTION"
The file \fIpathhistory\fR/\fIhistory\fR 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.
.PP
The text format described here applies to the default \f(CW\*(C`hisv6\*(C'\fR history
method.  The \f(CW\*(C`hissqlite\*(C'\fR method stores the same information in a single
SQLite database instead of this text file and its \fIdbz\fR indexes; see
\&\fBhissqlite\fR\|(5).
.PP
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.  \fBinnd\fR appends a new
line each time it files an article, and \fBexpire\fR builds a new version
of the file by removing old articles and purging old entries.
.PP
Each line consists of two or three fields separated by a tab, shown
below as \f(CW\*(C` \et \*(C'\fR:
.PP
.Vb 2
\&    [hash] \et date
\&    [hash] \et date \et @token@
.Ve
.PP
The \fIhash\fR field is the \s-1ASCII\s0 representation of the hash of the
Message-ID.  This is directly used for the key of the \fIdbz\fR.
.PP
The \fIdate\fR 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, that is to say a \fItime_t\fR like in \f(CWgettimeofday(2)\fR.
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 field, 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 field, recording when the article was posted.
.PP
The \fItoken\fR field is a token of the article.  This field is empty if
the article has been expired.
.PP
For example, an article whose Message-ID was
<7q2saq$sal$1@isrv4.pa.vix.com>, posted on 26 Aug 1999 08:02:34 \s-1GMT\s0
and received at 26 Aug 1999 08:06:54 \s-1GMT,\s0 could have a history line
(broken into three lines for display) like the following:
.PP
.Vb 3
\&    [E6184A5BC2898A35A3140B149DE91D5C] \et
\&        935678987~\-~935678821 \et
\&        @030154574F00000000000007CE3B000004BA@
.Ve
.PP
In addition to the text file, there is a \fIdbz\fR database associated
with the file that uses the Message-ID field as a key to determine the
offset in the text file where the associated line begins.  For historical
reasons, the key includes the trailing \f(CW\*(C`\e0\*(C'\fR byte (which is not stored
in the text file).
.SH "HISTORY"
.IX Header "HISTORY"
Written by Rich \f(CW$alz\fR <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews.  Rewritten
into \s-1POD\s0 by Julien Elie.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
.IX Header "SEE ALSO"
\&\fBexpire\fR\|(8), \fBhissqlite\fR\|(5), \fBinn.conf\fR\|(5), \fBinnd\fR\|(8), \fBlibinn_dbz\fR\|(3),
\&\fBmakehistory\fR\|(8).
