unicornucopious

At the office, I'm shelled into my laptop at home via ssh. Sometimes I encounter an interesting link that I'd like to explore more when I get home. "Social bookmarking" sites leave me cold, because it's clear that sites like del.icio.us aren't about making my bookmarks portable as they are about collecting cloud data. It's not a new problem, but I've never liked the given solutions.

Here's a little shell program that I wrote, which lets me add a bookmark to my Firefox 2 Bookmarks Toolbar from my ssh session.

Before:

After:

I emphasize that it's for Firefox 2 because Firefox 3 supposedly uses SQLite for storing bookmarks. It will be much simpler to hit SQLite than this sed/HTML solution, but alas Gentoo has yet to bless us with a FF3 ebuild.

To use it:

• Save the following as bookmark.sh
• chmod +x bookmark.sh
• Configure two values in the script
• ./bookmark.sh CNN http://www.cnn.com

Enjoy!

#
# This script will add a bookmark to Firefox 2.  This is 
# useful, for example when remoting to the machine with
# only ssh access.

# The script works by finding an existing bookmark with the
# name provided in PRIOR_LINK, and then prepending a new
# link.  Someone with better sed skills could eliminate the
# PRIOR_LINK requirement.
#
# Two arguments are expected: The bookmark name and the full URL
#
# Some notes:
# - This works with Firefox 2 only.  FF3 will use SQLite to
#     store bookmarks
# - This hasn't been tested much, so use reasonable inputs,
#     no unusual characters
# - The script tries to use reasonable error-checking, but
#     I'M NOT LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGE THAT MAY OCCUR, although
#     damage could be pretty easily repaired with a text editor.
#
# (c) Erik Mackdanz, free for any use
#

######### ADJUST THESE VALUES!!! ##########
# New links will go before the link with this name
PRIOR_LINK=Gmail

# Where is your bookmark file
BM_DIR=/home/erik/.mozilla/firefox/31327a70.default
###########################################




# What is your bookmark file's name
FILE_PROD=$BM_DIR/bookmarks.html

# What is a temp file we can use
FILE_WORK=$BM_DIR/bookmarksWorking.html

# Check inputs
if( (($# != 2)) )
then
	echo "Usage: $0 name url"
	echo "Example: $0 GreatArticles http://mackdanz.net"
	echo "Relatively untested, so avoid special charcters like " or \"
fi

# In URL, replace / with \/
ESCAPED_URL=`echo $2 | sed -e "s/\//\\\\\//g"`
#echo $ESCAPED_URL

# A unique ID is needed ... use date as nanos
RDF_ID=`date +"%N"`

# The date parameters are hard-coded, but the effects are probably minimal
NEW_LINK="    
<A HREF="$ESCAPED_URL" ADD_DATE="1188238631"
LAST_MODIFIED="1188238642" 
ID="rdf:\#\$$RDF_ID">$1<\/A>"

# Insert new link into working bookmark file
if ! sed -e "s/(^.*$PRIOR_LINK<\/A>$\)/$NEW_LINK

/" $FILE_PROD > $FILE_WORK
then
	echo Failure during text operation, quitting
	exit
fi

# Overwrite existing bookmarks file with working version
if ! cp $FILE_WORK $FILE_PROD
then
	echo Failure overwriting bookmarks file, quitting
	exit
fi

# Clean by deleting working version
if ! rm $FILE_WORK
then
	echo Failure deleting working file, quitting
	exit
fi