ACTIVE.TIMES(5)

NAME
active.times - newsgroup creation times and creators

DESCRIPTION
The active.times file records the arrival times of current 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/lib/newsbin/ctl/newgroup or /usr/lib/newsbin/maint/addgroup, the group name, time of group creation, and identity of the creator are appended to the /usr/lib/news/active.times file. The time is that returned by /usr/lib/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/lib/newsbin/ctl/newgroup, and from the environment variable USER (if any; the default identity is ``unknown'') for groups created with /usr/lib/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/lib/newsbin/maint/act.to.times (see newsmaint(8)).

FILES
/usr/lib/news/active.times
/usr/lib/newsbin/maint/addgroup
/usr/lib/newsbin/maint/act.to.times
/usr/lib/newsbin/ctl/newgroup

HISTORY
Conceived and implemented by Mark Moraes and Geoff Collyer as part of the C News project.

BUGS
This information really ought to be kept in another field of the active file instead.