How to access Firefox 3 bookmarks from the command line?

[Yuzem]

On the firefox forums someone told me to use sqlite but it doesn't work.

It tells me that the database is locked:
Error: database is locked
If I close firefox it tells me:
Unable to open database ".mozilla/firefox/adnu2zvf.default/places.sqlite": file is encrypted or is not a database

Here it is the post on mozillazine:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=655853

[aysiu]

In answer to your thread title question:

nano -B ~/.mozilla/firefox/adnu2zvf.default/bookmarks.html

should do it.

What might solve the post problem is:

mv ~/.mozilla ~/.mozilla.old
firefox &

[Yuzem]

Originally Posted by aysiu In answer to your thread title question: nano -B ~/.mozilla/firefox/adnu2zvf.default/bookmarks.html should do it.

That is the old bookmark file. I need to access the new bookmarks: places.sqlite (firefox 3)

Originally Posted by aysiu What might solve the post problem is: mv ~/.mozilla ~/.mozilla.old firefox &

If I do that I will lose all my bookmarks, extensions and settings and what would be the effect?

[Yuzem]

aysiu: Could you move this thread to the Programming Talk sub forum or I should ask again there?

What I really want to know is how to access firefox3 bookmarks form bash to add support for them to avatar-factory.

I realize that the Programming Talk sub forum is a better place for this question.

Thanks.

[Can+~]

Having the command line interface of sqlite3 (sqlite3 package on synaptic)

sqlite3 places.sqlite

sqlite> .databases
seq  name             file                                                      
----------------------------------------------------------
0    main             /home/canxp/places.sqlite

sqlite> .tables
moz_anno_attributes  moz_favicons         moz_keywords       
moz_annos            moz_historyvisits    moz_places         
moz_bookmarks        moz_inputhistory   
moz_bookmarks_roots  moz_items_annos

sqlite> SELECT * FROM moz_bookmarks

That last one produces a huge output.

Use the sqlite3 module of python, or the one on C, if you need to do something else with this data.

I made a copy of the file on my home folder by the way. Most probably, the error you get is that you're trying to open the database while firefox has a lock on it.

*edit*
Also, there's a little trick with firefox, you can make another account for your testing, open firefox with:

firefox-3.0 -ProfileManager

That will let you create new profiles (that are stored in the .mozilla folder), with that you can test without screwing with important data.

[Yuzem]

Thanks, that worked but I still can't access the database if firefox is running:

Error: database is locked

If a copy places.sqlite to temp dir I still get an error:

Unable to open database "places.sqlite": file is encrypted or is not a database

I don't need to do any advanced thing. I just need to parse all the bookmarks to manipulate them with bash.

Is there a simple command to export the bookmarks to a text format that can be accessed with cat, grep, sed etc...?