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I'd like to learn how to read my current Chrome session from the command line, but any other tool would be great.

For example, I'd like to save into file my current session (including URLs and titles of my tabs). I know there are some extensions for that, but I'm only interested in reading these files only.

These files on OS X are stored in: ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default.

Is there any way this can be achieved by some tool?

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3 Answers 3

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So far I've found Chromagnon tool written in Python which allows to read SNSS files to extract current tabs from current and last session.

Usage:

python chromagnonSession.py ~/.config/chromium/Default/Current\ Session
python chromagnonTab.py ~/.config/chromium/Default/Current\ Tabs

See: Reverse Engineering SNSS Format at GitHub

There is also JavaScript app called chrome-session-restore that can deal with Chrome sessions (after crash).

For more information check:

See also:

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    Thank you so much, all the other tools I've tried were either limited to a max number of tabs (chrome-session-restore) or just plainly failed because they were outdated (ccl_ssns). This one works very well (but you have to use the branch SNSS, not the main if you want the tabs recovering script).
    – gaborous
    Aug 14, 2015 at 23:41
  • Can someone please provide instructions on how to install this for OSX? I assume the lines under 'Usage' above need to be entered in Terminal, but i don't know where to install the Chromagnon files. I don't see instructions on Github either.
    – shape
    May 15, 2016 at 0:40
  • @shape You can ask a separate question regarding this with the details where you're stuck.
    – kenorb
    May 15, 2016 at 18:34
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    Still works but get the chromagnonSession.py, SNSSParse.py, sessionParse.py, pickle.py, types.py files from the SNSS tree: github.com/JRBANCEL/Chromagnon/tree/SNSS Not sure why they were deleted from master.
    – Robert Brisita
    Jul 24, 2019 at 23:25
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Just to add to the discussion, Chromagnon seems to stop short at parsing SQLLite files, which are relatively easy to read anyway, and only talks about partial reverse-engineering of SNSS, rather than offering a solution for parsing those files. There is another blog post, however, that seems to have gone into more detail on SNSS and wrote a tool for parsing it:

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There's https://github.com/instance01/chromium-snss-parse from 2017.

It doesn't look feature-complete (there's a list of "TODOs" here) but it seems to do what OP wants.

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