merge README

merge is a Perl script that merges Netscape, Mozilla and Internet Explorer bookmark files. Note that only certain versions of IE use bookmark files.

Obtaining merge

What merge Does

• Merges Netscape 4.x, Mozilla/Netscape 6.x and IE bookmark files.

What merge Doesn't Do Now, But May Do Later

• Check links for validity.
• Merge Opera bookmarks.
• Sort links
• Remove duplicate links from different folders.

Usage

Any combination of bookmark files is okay. The output type will be the same as the master type. Only URLs are compared; if they match, only the master copy is kept. The directory structure is kept intact. The resulting bookmarkfile is printed to stdout, so you'll want to redirect it to a file.

For example:

> merge -mNS bookmarks.html -sIE Favorites.html > newbookmarks.html

would merge a master Netscape file called "bookmarks.html" with a slave IE file called "Favorites.html" and write the merged file to "newbookmarks.html".

Change Log

merge-0.9

• Rewrote most of the internal structures, which means:
  • Adding new types of bookmark files should be much easier.
  • Link and folder meta-data is now mostly kept.
  • Separators should now work.
  • Crasher bugs related to huge bookmark files should go away.
• Crasher bug caused by lack of bookmark name is fixed.

merge-0.3

• IE bookmark files now work! (for those versions of IE that use bookmark files instead of a directory structure).
• Added the new command line stuff.
• Pipe symbols '|' are now turned into '!' before processing the bookmark file.
• The output spacing is a little more accurate (the browser doesn't really care, but I do :).

merge-0.2

• Got rid of some dumb parentheses in parseLinks().
• Added better URL comparing with the URL_equal() function. This should fix bug #113467. I don't think [http://foo.com] and [http://foo.com/index.html] should be the same anymore...PHP and other dynamic stuff has changed this. http://linuxtoday.com is a good example of this.
• printTree() now uses the current time for all the time-related stuff in the links. This should take care of bug #113469.

merge-0.1

• First release

Bugs/Issues

• [http://foo.com] will not match [http://foo.com/index.html] in any cases. This isn't a bug.
• merge may not preserve all attributes of a bookmark (like subscriptions or other really advanced stuff), but simple things like dates should be kept.
• merge is written in Perl, so you have to have a Perl interpreter. Perl is standard on most if not all UNIX-like operating systems, and there are Windows and Mac ports as well.
• On a related note, perl is expected to be in /usr/bin. You must change this if it is not there. Just set the first line of merge to your path to perl, or just run merge as an argument to the Perl interpreter. For the latter case, the command line would be:
  > perl merge -m[NS,IE] master-bookmarks.html -s[NS,IE] slave-bookmarks.html

License

merge uses the GPL. Please see the License.txt file that should have come with this package or: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html for a copy of the license.

Feedback

Feedback should be sent to buchmann@cs.unr.edu. I am mostly interested in bugs/platform issues, but any improvements or new features will be welcomed.