Ubuntu Firefox and Chrome - Read History on Command Line

You are very habitual of command line and you do most of your tasks like copying data, report generation, analyzing logs using terminal, you must have thought before if there is a way to read history of browser using command line.

Well yes there is definitely a way to complete this task. Browsers save the history in sqlite files. If you know basic queries of SQL, you can read history on terminal.

Firefox History using Terminal

cd ~/.mozilla/firefox

There must be a folder name with random string. Something like c18jclvi.default

cd ~/c18jclvi.default

You can find the sqlite file here i.e. places.sqlite.

Copy this file somewhere else like /tmp, If you use the file in firefox directory you may get "Error: database is locked" 

Open sqlite command prompt using following command.

sqlite3 /tmp/places.sqlite

To list all tables, run query

sqlite> .tables

You can find the url history in table moz_places.

sqlite> select * from moz_places;

To decode timestamp, first find the timestamp in the row. Usually 10th column is timestamp's column.

Divide this number buy 1000000. Now run command

date -d @1557653257.768815

It will display the correct date and time of this visited url.

Chrome History using Terminal

Similarly you can display chrome browser history in terminal.

cd ~/.config/google-chrome/Default

Copy filename History in some other place like /tmp. If you use the file in Chrome directory you may get "Error: database is locked" 

sqlite3 /tmp/History

To list all tables, run query

sqlite> .tables

You can find the url history in table urls.

sqlite> select * from urls;