ACTTIMES(8C)

NAME
acttimes - Maintain the newsgroup-creation-date file

SYNOPSIS
acttimes [ -d ]
acttimes -k

DESCRIPTION
Acttimes is a program that maintains the active.times file for those systems whose news software doesn't maintain it for them. A system that is running C news or INN should already have a valid /usr/local/news/lib/active.times file and therefore doesn't need acttimes to maintain it.

When executed, acttimes will create or maintain active.times by reading the active file, /usr/local/news/lib/active, and adding any groups it finds that aren't already in the file. It uses the current time and a fake user-id to create the entry since it doesn't have access to the article that created the group.

The active.times file is a list of each new newsgroup that gets created on your system, the date it was created, and who asked for it to be created. This file enables NNTP to respond to the NEWGROUPS command with a list of groups that are newer than a certain date. Without the file, the NEWGROUPS command cannot function. The format is: ``newsgroup date user-id'' where ``newsgroup'' is the name of the group in question, ``date'' is the newsgroup's creation time, in seconds since midnight, Jan. 1, 1970, GMT, and ``user-id'' is the name of the user who created the group, or ``acttimes@local'', if not known.

Acttimes can be run either as a daemon process, or from cron.

To run it as a daemon, specify the -d option and give it the number of minutes it should wait to wake up (the default is a quick 10 minutes). For example, ``acttimes -d120'' would start acttimes and have it wake up every 2 hours. To kill the daemon, use the command, ``acttimes -k''.

To run acttimes from cron, don't specify any options. A minimum update period is probably once or twice a day, but running it more often will make the new groups available in a more timely manner.

FILES
LOCKacttimes

AUTHOR
Wayne Davison

SEE ALSO
cron(1), nntpd(8C)