Thanks for the suggestion; I'll keep it in mind. (Safari has been quiescent the past coupl'a days, so...)

But don't you harbor any ill feelings towards the tracking cookies that Safari stores in RAM and that can be cleared only by quitting it?/*


NB: This and the following 5 posts were extracted from the thread Safari Web Content crashes as a separate topic. Alternaut

Not really, any important ones like forum information expire after a relatively short period of time, so when I return it's a new session anyway.

Have you ever cleared (or seen) this one?

ls -lhn ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/History/.tracked\ filenames.plist

defaults read ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/History/.tracked\ filenames




/edit: Figured i should probably mention that those two orange lines are actually terminal commands. Running the first one (e.g., via copy/paste) will list a hidden file... if it exists. Doing that much will show us its size (among other things). Running the second command will display its content. Observe that, not only is the file hidden in Finder (via the leading dot in its name), but —for something sitting in a folder named "History" —it typically isn't affected when we clear Safari's history. In fact, i've been told that it even survives a 'Reset Safari...' menu operation. (idunno)

So far (despite posting about it far and wide), i have not learned this file's actual purpose (e.g., does it truly benefit the user?), nor which entity is "in charge" of it. [Apple?, Google? who?]

I used both the Terminal commands.

The first one netted:

-rw-r--r--@ 1 501 501 67K 8 Mar 01:22 /Users/myname/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/History/.tracked filenames.plist
firstname-lastnames-imac:~ myname $

But the second one generated a long list that contained information about many places I know I visited (PayPal, my bank, newspapers, et cetera). However there were many more names that clearly were tracking sites (Tribal Fusion, DoubleClick, Quote Media, Google Leads, and so on)

Am I correct to assume that this is simply an historical file and that using something like Cocktail to make it visible and then deleting it is not going to net any real gain - like screwing up the tracking people.

Seems like one of those "dump the folder" situations:


(Note that the above script assumes you're not someone who uses the Trash to store things you're not ready to delete yet!)

It appears that the contents of that folder are written to RAM when Safari is launched, so you need to quit Safari before trashing them or they'll be regenerated along with the folder whenever Safari next wants to write to it.

FWIW, .tracked filenames.plist, as mentioned elsewhere, seems to consist of the URLs of sites which came up as Google search results and were actually visited.

Hmm, seems that on sites using Google Custom Search, the search URL itself is written to .tracked filenames.plist whether you visit any of the links or not.

Bear with me...neophyte questions...Would that be why there are so may complete URLs? Are they complete so that, when these addresses are loaded into RAM, there is an immediate connection to the sites?

I note than many of the URLs don't use www after HTTP:// For example:

.a.tribalfusion.
ad.ca.doubleclick
app.quotemedia
googleads.g.doubleclick

I don't know what its actual purpose is, but i find it odd that it wants to persist forever (e.g., clearing history and reset safari have no effect usually). Is that intentional (on Apple's part), or a bug in Safari? [i.e., it simply overlooked any need to delete dot files in the History folder, because Apple doesn't create them.]

? idunno.

Also curious is how little info we obtain about it via google (or bing, etc).





That's some of it, yes. And i think changing our default search engine from google to something else may have an effect as well. [i have not conducted rigorous experiments or anything.]

But i've also seen certain facebook urls sitting in there (sans any google relationship). ::shrug::

I use a shell script to srm the puppy, which i run every time i quit Safari.


[edit/ NB: avoid running srm on entire folders while using wildcards (especially the asterisk: folder/*). I normally aim it at specific file paths. (it's not crafted as cautiously as regular rm is).]

Sorry for being slow to get back to you.

I was unaware of that file until you mentioned it. (It's much easier to read in TextWrangler than in Terminal.)

My file did not list any of the tracking garbage that ryck's listed, possibly because I'm running Ghostery?

My file did list an incomplete compilation of my recent Google searches (none of which were "Advanced" searches), but it also listed a coupl'a searches of my PayPal history and a coupl'a other searches that were done without Google involvement, which suggests that Google has nothing to do with it.

My file disappeared when I cleared Safari's history and hasn't reappeared after a coupl'a Google searches (including one that was originally listed).

I dunno.

Edit: Add link to screenshot.

Edit 2: Interesting sidenote... If I clear Safari's history via Safari > History > Clear History, /Users/artie/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/History is cleared of all files, but if I clear it with Cookie (3rd party d/l), all files remain, although Safari > History shows nothing.