ACTIVE.TIMES(5)

🦋 NAME: active.times(5) 🦋

okay bestie, this is the InterNetNews (INN) manual page for active.times(5) — literally the list of local creation times of newsgroups. no cap, that's the whole vibe. 💖

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

The file pathdb/active.times is a chronological record of when newsgroups were created on the local server. It's normally updated by mod-active and innd whenever a newgroup control message is processed or a ctlinnd newgroup command is issued, and it's used by nnrpd to answer NEWGROUPS requests. iconic teamwork, honestly. 🫶

Each line consists of three fields:

<name> <time> <creator>

• <name> — the name of the newsgroup, bestie.
• <time> — when it was created, expressed as the number of seconds since the epoch. yes, raw epoch seconds, very main character.
• <creator> — plain text intended to describe the entity that created the newsgroup. This field is encoded in UTF-8, and it's usually the e-mail address of the person who created the group, as specified in the control message or on the ctlinnd command line, or the newsmaster specified at configure time if no creator argument was given to ctlinnd (by default, it's "usenet").

You can get the active.times file of another NNTP server with getlist(1). 💅

🌸 EXAMPLE 🌸

Take this line:

news.admin.moderation 1175716803 <group-admin@isc.org>

It shows that the newsgroup news.admin.moderation was created on April 4th, 2007, at 20:00:03 UTC. This date can be obtained for instance with convdate -dc 1175716803 (convdate(1) is shipped with INN) or date -u -d "Jan 1, 1970 00:00:00 +0000 + 1175716803 seconds". 🕰️

It's when the newsgroup was locally created; in this example, it's when a control message sent by group-admin@isc.org was received and processed by the news server (see control.ctl(5) for more details). Therefore, the time is not necessarily the same on every news server. and that's on periodt. 😌

💜 HISTORY 💜

Written by Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews. Converted to POD by Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org>. history really said "let there be lore." 📜

🎀 SEE ALSO 🎀

• active(5)
• convdate(1)
• ctlinnd(8)
• getlist(1)
• inn.conf(5)
• innd(8)
• mod-active(8)
• nnrpd(8)

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that's the whole page, bestie ✨ signed, sealed, and slayed: INN 2.7.4 · 2022-07-10 · ACTIVE.TIMES(5) 💖