ACTIVE.TIMES(5) UNIX System V(8 May 1990) ACTIVE.TIMES(5)
NAME
active.times - newsgroup creation times and creators
DESCRIPTION
The active.times file records the arrival of new newsgroups by time and
creator. This provides a quick way for newsreaders to tell when new
groups have arrived, without weird heuristics and time/space expensive
schemes like storing old lists of newsgroups and comparing them to the
active file.
When a new newsgroup is created by C News, via
/usr/dell/cnews/newsbin/ctl/newgroup or
/usr/dell/cnews/newsbin/maint/addgroup, the group name, time of group
creation, and identity of the creator are appended to the
/usr/dell/cnews/lib/active.times file. The time is that returned by
/usr/dell/cnews/newsbin/maint/getdate and on Unix systems is the number
of seconds since January 1, 1970, 00:00, GMT. The identity of the
creator is taken from the Sender: or From: headers in the control
message for groups added with /usr/dell/cnews/newsbin/ctl/newgroup, and
from the environment variable USER (if any; the default identity is
``unknown'') for groups created with
/usr/dell/cnews/newsbin/maint/addgroup.
Each line in the file is of the form
newsgroup creation-time creator
The file must always be sorted in increasing order of the creation-time
field. The scripts only append to the file, which normally suffices to
ensure this. (It is assumed that time on the machine does not jump
backward!)
An initial version of active.times for already existing newsgroups, with
all times equal to the time of its creation and all creators ``unknown'',
can be built using /usr/dell/cnews/newsbin/maint/act.to.times (see
newsmaint(8)).
FILES
/usr/dell/cnews/lib/active.times
/usr/dell/cnews/newsbin/maint/addgroup
/usr/dell/cnews/newsbin/maint/act.to.times
/usr/dell/cnews/newsbin/ctl/newgroup
HISTORY
Conceived and implemented by Mark Moraes and Geoff Collyer as part of the
C News project.
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