Changi NNTP Server 1.0

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history

The history keeps a record of all articles in your local newsbase, as well as those that have expired but should still be remembered to avoid receiving late duplicates.

In fact the history is stored in two separate files in Changi's working directory. One is named history.pag, a simple text file where each line corresponds to one article. The lines are kept in the order in which the articles have been received.

In addition to this text file, there is a database index named history.idx. This binary file contains the message id of each article together with an offset into history.pag.

Each line in history.pag consists of two or four fields separated by spaces.

message-id time [size articles]
message-id
This is the article's Message-ID including the angle brackets.

time
Specifies the time at which the article has been received, an optional expiration time and the article's posting date, represented by the number of seconds since 01/01/1970. The three fields are separated by a tilde character. If, like with most articles, the expiration time is not explicitly defined, then the second field contains a dash.

size
The size of the article represented by the number of bytes.

This field is empty if the article has been expired.

articles
This is a list of comma separated entries, each of which consists of the name of a newsgroup followed by a colon and an article number.

This field is empty if the article has been expired.

Assuming that an article containing 939 bytes has been cross-posted to alt.cracks and local.flame, then this article's history line may look like:

<312@lilly.ping.de> 850213892~-~846530969 939 alt.cracks:143,local.flame:77
If your history files get lost or corrupted you can use Expire to recreate them.


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URL: changi/manual/history.html
Created: 3 August 1996
Revised: 21 November 1996
Author: harald@os2point.ping.de