ACTIVE.TIMES(5)

NAME
active.times - List of local creation times of newsgroups

DESCRIPTION
The file pathdb/active.times provides a chronological record of when newsgroups were created on the local server. This file is normally updated by mod-active and innd whenever a newgroup control message is processed or a "ctlinnd newgroup" command is issued, and is used by nnrpd to answer NEWGROUPS requests.

Each line consists of three fields:

    <name> <time> <creator>

The first field is the name of the newsgroup. The second field is the time it was created, expressed as the number of seconds since the epoch. The third field is plain text intended to describe the entity that created the newsgroup. This field is encoded in UTF-8 and is 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 is "usenet").

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

EXAMPLE
The line:

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

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 is when the newsgroup was locally created; in this example, it is 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.

HISTORY
Written by Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews. Converted to POD by Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org>.

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