This program divulges the contents of Netscape's history.db file. It can be called with full URLs or with a (single) pattern. If called without arguments, it displays every entry in the history file. The ~/.netscape/history.db file is used unless the -database option is given.
Each output line shows the URL and its access time. The time is converted into localtime representation with -localtime (the default), gmtime representation with -gmtime - or left in raw form with -epochtime, which is useful for sorting by date.
To specify a pattern to match against, give one single argument without a ://.
To look up one or more URLs, supply them as arguments:
% ggh http://www.perl.com/index.html
To find out a link you don't quite recall, use a regular expression (a single argument without a :// is a pattern):
% ggh perl
To find out all the people you've mailed:
% ggh mailto:
To find out the FAQ sites you've visited, use a snazzy Perl pattern with an embedded /i modifier:
% ggh -regexp '(?i)\bfaq\b'
If you don't want the internal date converted to localtime, use -epoch:
% ggh -epoch http://www.perl.com/perl/
If you prefer gmtime to localtime, use -gmtime:
% ggh -gmtime http://www.perl.com/perl/
To look at the whole file, give no arguments (but perhaps redirect to a pager):
% ggh | less
If you want the output sorted by date, use the -epoch flag:
% ggh -epoch | sort -rn | less
If you want it sorted by date into your local time zone format, use a more sophisticated pipeline:
% ggh -epoch | sort -rn | perl -pe 's/\d+/localtime $&/e' | less
The Netscape release notes claim that they're using NDBM format. This is misleading: they're actually using Berkeley DB format, which is why we require DB_File (not supplied standard with all systems Perl runs on) instead of NDBM_File (which is). The program is shown in Example 14.8.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# ggh -- grovel global history in netscape logs
$USAGE = <<EO_COMPLAINT;
usage: $0 [-database dbfilename] [-help]
[-epochtime | -localtime | -gmtime]
[ [-regexp] pattern] | href ... ]
EO_COMPLAINT
use Getopt::Long;
($opt_database, $opt_epochtime, $opt_localtime,
$opt_gmtime, $opt_regexp, $opt_help,
$pattern, ) = (0) x 7;
usage() unless GetOptions qw{ database=s
regexp=s
epochtime localtime gmtime
help
};
if ($opt_help) { print $USAGE; exit; }
usage("only one of localtime, gmtime, and epochtime allowed")
if $opt_localtime + $opt_gmtime + $opt_epochtime > 1;
if ( $opt_regexp ) {
$pattern = $opt_regexp;
} elsif (@ARGV && $ARGV[0] !~ m(://)) {
$pattern = shift;
}
usage("can't mix URLs and explicit patterns")
if $pattern && @ARGV;
if ($pattern && !eval { '' =~ /$pattern/; 1 } ) {
$@ =~ s/ at \w+ line \d+\.//;
die "$0: bad pattern $@";
}
require DB_File; DB_File->import(); # delay loading until runtime
$| = 1; # feed the hungry PAGERs
$dotdir = $ENV{HOME} || $ENV{LOGNAME};
$HISTORY = $opt_database || "$dotdir/.netscape/history.db";
die "no netscape history dbase in $HISTORY: $!" unless -e $HISTORY;
die "can't dbmopen $HISTORY: $!" unless dbmopen %hist_db, $HISTORY, 0666;
# the next line is a hack because the C programmers who did this
# didn't understand strlen vs strlen+1. jwz told me so. :-)
$add_nulls = (ord(substr(each %hist_db, -1)) == 0);
# XXX: should now do scalar keys to reset but don't
# want cost of full traverse, required on tied hashes.
# better to close and reopen?
$nulled_href = "";
$byte_order = "V"; # PC people don't grok "N" (network order)
if (@ARGV) {
foreach $href (@ARGV) {
$nulled_href = $href . ($add_nulls && "\0");
unless ($binary_time = $hist_db{$nulled_href}) {
warn "$0: No history entry for HREF $href\n";
next;
}
$epoch_secs = unpack($byte_order, $binary_time);
$stardate = $opt_epochtime ? $epoch_secs
: $opt_gmtime ? gmtime $epoch_secs
: localtime $epoch_secs;
print "$stardate $href\n";
}
} else {
while ( ($href, $binary_time) = each %hist_db ) {
chop $href if $add_nulls;
next unless defined $href && defined $binary_time;
# gnat reports some binary times are missing
$binary_time = pack($byte_order, 0) unless $binary_time;
$epoch_secs = unpack($byte_order, $binary_time);
$stardate = $opt_epochtime ? $epoch_secs
: $opt_gmtime ? gmtime $epoch_secs
: localtime $epoch_secs;
print "$stardate $href\n" unless $pattern && $href !~ /$pattern/o;
}
}
sub usage {
print STDERR "@_\n" if @_;
die $USAGE;
}