MAKEACTIVE(8)

💖 MAKEACTIVE 💖

okay bestie, gather round, because we're talking about makeactive, the section 8 system manager's manual girlie whose whole job is rescuing your Usenet active file when everything's gone sideways ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

makeactive — the tool that recovers your Usenet active file 🫶

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

makeactive [ -m ] [ -o ]

that's it. two little flags. she's low maintenance, she's iconic 💅

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so here's the vibe. makeactive goes and invokes find(1) to pull a list of every single directory in the news spool tree, which lives at /var/spool/news. then she starts being picky (as she should 👑):

• directories named lost+found? discarded. not today.
• directories with a period in the name? also discarded.
• everything else? she scans all of them looking for all-numeric filenames, and figures out the highest and lowest number in each one.

and what comes out the other side? a whole set of active(5) file lines. periodt. ✨

now here's the part you need to know, and I'm gonna say it loud: because there is no way to know if a group is moderated or disabled, the fourth field of all entries will be y. every single one. no exceptions, no guessing, that's just the deal 🙈

also, mid-level directories that aren't actually newsgroups will also get created as newsgroups with no entries. like, there's a comp.sources.unix group, but no comp.sources. yeah. she just makes it. that's her main character energy 💅

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💜 OPTIONS 💜

• -m — okay so if you pass the -m flag, makeactive will try to adjust the highest and lowest article numbers wherever possible. if articles are actually found in a newsgroup, the numbers will reflect what was found. if <em>no</em> articles are found in a newsgroup, the high number from the old file gets kept, and the low number gets set to one more than the high number. and listen — this flag may only be used if the -o flag is also used. that's not optional, bestie, that's the rules.
• -o — if the -o flag is used, makeactive will read an existing active file for the list of group names and just renumber all the groups. she'll preserve the fourth field of the active file if one is present 🫶 this is analogous to the ctlinnd(8) renumber command, except that innd(8) should be throttled or not running. and hmm, important: do not use this flag with output redirected to the standard active file! like, do not. I'm serious. 😭

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⭐ EXIT STATUS ⭐

makeactive exits with a non-zero status if any problems occurred. if she's happy, she's quiet. if she's not, she tells you. slay 💅

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🎀 EXAMPLES 🎀

a typical way to use the program is with the following /bin/sh commands:

ctlinnd throttle "Rebuilding active file"
TEMP=${TMPDIR-/var/spool/news/in.coming/tmp}/act$$
if [ -f /var/lib/news/active ] ; then
    if makeactive -o >${TEMP} ; then
        mv ${TEMP} /var/lib/news/active
    fi
else
    if makeactive >${TEMP} ; then
        # Edit to restore moderated
        # and aliased groups.
        ...
        mv ${TEMP} /var/lib/news/active
    fi
fi
ctlinnd reload active "New active file"
ctlinnd go ''

look at her go 😭 throttle, rebuild, reload, go. the whole glow-up routine 🌈

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🌸 HISTORY 🌸

Written by Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews. This is revision 1.3, dated 1996/10/29. an absolute legend, no cap 👑

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💖 SEE ALSO 💖

active(5), ctlinnd(8), dbz(3), filechan(8), history(5), innd(8), newsfeeds(5), makehistory(8), newsrequeue(8).

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and that's the whole page, bestie! go forth and rebuild that active file responsibly 🫶✨

kisses, this was MAKEACTIVE(8) from the System Manager's Manual — revision 1.3, dated 1996/10/29, written by Rich $alz for InterNetNews. bye ily 💖