[Simon]

I have quite a collection of links on my disk as .webloc files. From time to time I ssh into my Mac from a Linux box. Since .webloc files store the URL in a resource fork I can't do
% more bookmark.webloc
or a
% strings bookmark.webloc
because the data fork is empty. Is there any way to extract the URL in the command line?

[Mithras]

cat someurl.webloc/rsrc dumps the binary, which includes the URL in plaintext. In general the resource fork is accessible by appending /rsrc.

It'll take a little fiddling in Perl to cleanly extract the URL itself, but it shouldn't be too hard.

[Simon]

Originally posted by Mithras:
cat someurl.webloc/rsrc dumps the binary, which includes the URL in plaintext. In general the resource fork is accessible by appending /rsrc.

It'll take a little fiddling in Perl to cleanly extract the URL itself, but it shouldn't be too hard.

Mithras, many thanks! I didn't know the trick with appending /rsrc to get the resource fork of the file

% strings bookmark.webloc/rsrc
prints the URL on the fourth line in clear text.

Great. Thanks!

[Mithras]

Sure. In the meantime I made this, although 'strings' will probably do you fine.

Code:
perl -ne '@ASCII = unpack("C*",$_); $in_url = 1; for($i=312; ($i < scalar @ASCII and $in_url == 1); $i++) {if ($ASCII[$i] == 0) { $in_url = 0; } else { print chr($ASCII[$i]); } }; print "\n";' < someurl.webloc/rsrc

Or, as a script that you can call with scriptname.pl someurl.webloc/rsrc:

Code:
#!/usr/bin/env perl

while (<>)
{
@ASCII = unpack("C*",$_); 
$i = 312; # starting position

while ($i < scalar @ASCII and $ASCII[$i] != 0) 
{
	print chr($ASCII[$i]); 
	$i++;
}

print "\n";
}