[net.news.b] Recreating the history file

solomon (03/26/83)

Occasionally, for reasons too obscure and too rare to track down,
news items fail to get listed in the history file.  Since expire
uses the history file, that means that the items never get deleted.
I wrote a little program that recreates the history file from the
files that are actually there.  It should also be very useful if for
some reason the history file gets destroyed.

The output of my program cannot be directly compared to the original
history file with diff because the history file contains "file names"
that are longer than 14 characters.  Thus the line
  zehntel.838	Fri Mar 11 05:48:22 1983	net.unix-wizards/1769 
would appear in the output of my program as
  zehntel.838	Fri Mar 11 05:48:22 1983	net.unix-wizar/1769 
I wrote an awk script to "fix" the history file to match the output
of my program.

I have posted both the program and the awk script to net.sources.