chrome-session-dump

What

A tool for dumping the contents of chrome session files.

Why?

Most tools for reading SNSS files (chrome session files) are either broken or outdated. This tool aims to facilitate scripting by providing a clean way of extracting useful information (like the active tab) from a running or saved chrome session. You could, for instance, use the tool to extract the current page within an external script and download its contents to disk or store it inside a bookmark file.

Installation

From Source

make && sudo make install

Binaries are also available for linux and macOS.

Linux

sudo curl -o /usr/bin/chrome-session-dump -L 'https://github.com/lemnos/chrome-session-dump/releases/download/v0.0.1/chrome-session-dump-linux' && sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/chrome-session-dump

macOS

sudo curl -o /usr/bin/chrome-session-dump -L 'https://github.com/lemnos/chrome-session-dump/releases/download/v0.0.1/chrome-session-dump-osx' && sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/chrome-session-dump

Usage

# chrome-session-dump # Print the url of all tabs found in the session in order.
https://ddg.gg
https://protonmail.com

# chrome-session-dump -active # Print the url of the most recently active tab
https://protonmail.com

# chrome-session-dump -printf '%t\n'
Secure email: ProtonMail is free encrypted email.
DuckDuckGo — Privacy, simplified.

# chrome-session-dump -deleted -history|grep 'chrome-session-dump' # Search the history of all (potentially deleted) tabs for a url containing the given expression.
https://github.com/lemnos/chrome-session-dump

A session file (or chrome directory) can optionally be provided as the final argument, by default the tool will look for the most recent session file in ~/.config/chrome.

Caveats

• Won't work on incognito tabs (since they are not persisted to disk).
• The output lags behind changes by a few milliseconds since chrome does not immediately flush changes to disk.

To whom it may concern

Please don't use this for evil.