MAN page from RedHat Other browser-history-2.5-1.i586.rpm

BROWSER-HISTORY

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: local
Index

NAME

browser-history - external history of web browsers, such as netscape

SYNOPSIS

browser-history[ options ]

DESCRIPTION

Browser-Historyis a client-side Xdaemon maintaining a browser-independent global history of all the websites you visited .Its usage is very simple, just put the following linein your .xinitrc or your X start-up script:

: browser-history &

And open the file ~/.browser-history/history-log.htmland bookmark it.

Browser-history came from the will to overcome a Netscape bug: there was noglobal history, and if you close a window, its whole history is lost. Forpeople browsing lots of sites, having a possibility to track back where onehas been before means that you dont have to put everything in your bookmarksfile. If you are not sure if a site may be worth remebering, don't add it inyour bookmarks. If you need it later, just browse your history files.

Later, it came to our minds that this also could be a valuable add-on topeople writing experimental browsers, so they dont have to add thisfunctionality to their browser itself.

Browser-history is a small and efficient daemon. Real user services could bebuilt on top of the log files it maintains for more possibilities (graphicalrepresentation, advanced search options, collective histories). It can be seenas a quick-and-dirty hack wrt to the general solution of using a personalproxy to provide this history and housekeeping facilities. But in themeantime, it is easy to use and it works.

IMPLEMENTATION

Browser-Historyspies your web browser and logs in~/.browser-history/history-log.html all the URLs you went through. You canthen browse the log under Netscape or other browsers via the URL:file:~/.browser-history/history-log.html (replace the ~ by your home directory). It tracks automagically all already present browser windows, and all newones created in the future. This program has no user interface. It just appensinformation to a log file in html format so you can browse it through a webbrowser. If more that one hour has passed since last entry, it draws anhorizontal lines, and adds H1 headers to delimit new days. Each week (sundaymornings), it archives the week history, compresses it by gzip (that you musthave in your path), and starts a new history with links to the older ones. Tomake room you can just remove the obsolete history files. You can search filesfor string XXX in shell via:

: zgrep XXX ~/.browser-history/*

This version (2.5) works with Netscape, Arena and Amaya.

URLs can be excluded from logging by putting them, one per line in thefile ~/.browser-history/history-log.exclude, then, if an URL begins with aline from this file, it is not logged. In this file, empty lines or linesbeginning by # are comments This file is read once at startup, and re-readwhen receiving the signal 1. e.g:

:     # We exclude local files
    file:
    # Exclude search engines...
    http://home.netscape.com
    http://guide.infoseek.com

When browser-history is run, it looks if another one is running, and bydefault it kills the previous one if it is an older version. Otherwise, it thenew one is the same version number or older, it just aborts.

OPTIONS

All options can be given by their first letter: you can specify either-verbose or -v, but you cannot group options, e.g. you must say -v -k, but not-vk

-display display_name

Specifies X display, otherwise contents of $DISPLAY is used

-verbose

outputs information on what it is doing. useful for debug.

-Version

prints version number and exit.

-logdir directory

which directory to store files into? defaults to ~/.browser-history

-gzip gzip_filename

the complete path to thegzipcompressor. Defaults to "gzip". E.g:

: -gzip /usr/gnu/bin/gzip

-seconds delay

if two entries are made are more than delay seconds apart, an horizontal rule will separate them, elsejust a simple line break. Defaults to one hour (3600).

-replace

If there is an already runningbrowser-history on the display, aborts. Default is to replace it only ifthe version is older than ours.

-noreplace

If there is an already runningbrowser-history on the display, aborts. Default is to replace it only ifthe version is older than ours.

-kill

If there is an already running browser-historyon the display, kills it, then terminates immediately in all cases..TP-DontGrabNever Grab the X Server, which might causedeadlocks while debugging, when browser-history or gdb tries to print onthe grabbed xterm or emacs.

LOG FILE FORMAT

A log file can have some decorative HTML to represent days, but each entry hasthe form: (on a single line since version 2.4)

    separator    <b>name</b>    <a href="URL">URL</a>    YYYY/MM/DD-HH:MN:SS <small>windowid</small>

where the following items are:

separator: either <hr> or <br>name: the name of the document (window title)URL: its URLYYYY/MM/DD-HH:MN:SS: year, month number, day number, hour,                          minutes, seconds. (2-digit numbers)windowid: the X window ID of the browser window, in hexadecimal

NoteBefore version 2.4, the 4 sub-parts were separated by newlines, but since 2.4, they are only blank-separated to ease searching for URL in logfiles via "grep".NoteBefore version 2.5, the year was stored in 2 digits. Now it is stored in 4 (or more :-) digits, to fix this Y2K bug

HOME

The latest version of browser-historycan be found at:

: ftp://koala.inria.fr/pub/browser-history

and its WWW home page, with full technical documentation is at:

: http://www.inria.fr/koala/colas/browser-history

AUTHOR

Colas Nahaboo, http://www.inria.fr/koala/colas

COPYRIGHT

browser-historybears the same license as the X Window System: you can do everything with thiscode (selling it, modifying it), except suing me or using my name in youradvertisements, or expecting any kind of support or guarantee.

This document was created byman2html,using the manual pages.