Perl Cookbook

Program: ggh—Grep Netscape Global History

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 ...