PRUNEHISTORY(8)

💅 PRUNEHISTORY — the InterNetNews docs, bestie edition ✨

okay so real quick: this is a page from the InterNetNews Documentation set, and it's all about prunehistory, the little tool that removes tokens from a Usenet history file. yes it's niche. yes it's iconic. let's go 🫶

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🌸 NAME 🌸

prunehistory — remove tokens from the Usenet history file, no cap 💅

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

prunehistory [-p] [-f filename]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So here's the vibe: prunehistory edits a text file that's in history(5) format and "removes" a bunch of tokens from it. and when I say "removes" I mean it literally overwrites them with spaces — which is the whole slay, because it means the size and position of every entry that comes after them stays exactly the same 🎀

the effect is lowkey similar to expiring the article: it's still mentioned in the history database, but it cannot be retrieved. it's giving "on the list but not invited" 😭💀

prunehistory reads from standard input, and it treats that input as a set of lines:

• blank lines? ignored 🙈
• lines starting with a number sign (#)? also ignored, those are comments bestie
• every other line should be a message-ID followed by zero or more other fields (and yeah, those extra fields get ignored, they're just along for the ride)

that message-ID gets used as the dbz key to grab an offset into the text file. and since innd only ever appends to the text file, prunehistory doesn't need any interaction with it at all — no coordinating, no drama, no group chat needed 👑

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💖 OPTIONS 💖

• -p — normally prunehistory will complain about lines that don't follow the correct format. but if you pass -p, it silently prints any invalid lines on its standard output instead. (blank lines and comment lines get passed through too, so nothing's lost ✨)
• -f filename — the default name of the history file is pathdb/history; to specify a different name, use the -f flag. simple as that 🎀

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🌈 HISTORY 🌈

Written by Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews. Converted to POD by Julien Elie. a whole origin story, honestly 👑

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

history(5), innd(8), libinn_dbz(3) — go read those too, they're fr fr worth it 💜

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tiny reminder bestie: this thing blanks out tokens in place, so don't go expecting the file to shrink or anything. spaces are the moment. 🍓

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and that's the whole page!! 🧚 from the INN 2.7.4 era, dated 2022-07-10 — mwah, slay, periodt 💅💖