Sweeper is a KDE utility included with KDE 4.2, is released under the GPL, and is currently enjoying version 1.2. Sweeper is very simple to use, does one thing and does it well.  Simplicity is certainly one of the best features in Sweeper. You start it up, select what you want to clean, and press the Clean up button. Sweeper is so simple to use, there is no documentation. So why am I writing about Sweeper? Because no one knows about this handy utility.

Starting and Using Sweeper

You can find Sweeper in the Accessories menu under the GNOME desktop. In KDE 4.x you can do a search for Sweeper (in the main menu search) and it will show up. Finding the Sweeper entry can be rough in KDE 4.x. If you click on the Main menu click on the Applications tab and then click on the Utilities entry and then click on the More Applications entry. Under the More Applications entry you will see System Cleaner menu entry, click on that to open Sweeper.

Sweeper Window

The image to the left is the only window for the Sweeper application. There is no window for settings, options, or preferences. This one window is where all the action takes place.

Once you open up the window you will see two panes. The top pane is where you select the various types of data you can clean up. The lower pane is the information pane. As data is cleaned you will see a message in the bottom window indicating the data has been cleaned up.

The buttons along the bottom are pretty obvious. The left-most button selects all data types, the middle button selects none of the data types, and the right-most button does the clean up job.

Once you clean up your system and you close Sweeper, the next time you open the application all data types will be, once again, selected. Having all data types selected is the default action and can not be changed. You can also not add data types to the applications. This is truly a “what you see is what you get” utility.

Final Thoughts

Sweeper is a great way to keep your Linux system clean and free of the tracks you often do not want to leave behind. Instead of having to manage numerous tools for this job, why not employ one single tool to do the trick for all of those cookies, files, and histories you do not want to leave around.

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Historian is a free portable software program that can process the browsing history of several popular web browsers and export the information into csv or text format. Supported browsers are Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox 2 and 3, Google Chrome and Opera. This includes information about bookmarks, the browsing history, downloads, cookies and cache information.

The usability of the software program is not optimal. One has to drag and drop the files that are storing the information from the web browser’s directories into the interface to process them. This can obviously only be done if the user knows the location and names of those files. It is likely that only a minority knows that Firefox is storing its bookmarks in a file called places.sqlite or that Opera is storing information about file downloads in download.dat.

The only other limitation is that the only files of the same type can be analyzed at the same time. There is practically no way of adding all browsing history files of various installed web browsers in one go to the application because of their different formats. The workaround would be to create the csv files (or text) for each source file and copy paste the information into one big csv file in the end.

It would be a great improvement if the software developer would add an automatic scan of the system to the software program. It would also be nice if different files could be queued in the application so that they could be processed together.

Historian on the other hand is a versatile portable program that can identify the browsing history of all popular web browsers with the exception of Safari.

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The feature is available right in the location bar of Opera 9.5. Hits begin to appear with the first key that is entered. This is in my opinion a great way of finding websites that you have visited but can’t remember the url of because it is sufficient to enter any term that you can remember that was mentioned on the website as long as it was textual.

The data that is needed is stored in the Opera profile folder and deleted once you clear the cache and addresses in the preferences. The Opera Preference Editor contains a setting called Max Visited Pages Index Size which defines the maximum size of the pages that are stored in the profile directory.

The default value is unlimited (-1). You can change the value to 0 if you want to disable that feature or to another value if you want to limit the size on the hard drive. I think it’s Kilobytes and not Megabytes that you have to enter there just like in the Cache setting.

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Statistics can be accessed on the Hooeey website which offers a search, access to all links and extensive statistics like top links, browsing time and analysis. The Browsing Time graph for instance displays the amount of time per day that you spend surfing the web.

All links visited on a certain day can be displayed which is very nice if you want to look something up again. The nicest feature in my opinion however is the ability to create so called Webtours which are basically link collections. Those Webtours can be shared with others. Take a look at this sample Webtour for an impression.

Users can add links that should never be stored in the Settings. Several default types can be checked, for instance https, ftp or email provider websites. Additionally urls can be added to a form field. Bookmarks from several browsers can be imported here as well.

I had troubles getting the button to work. The toolbar was installing nicely in Firefox but the button did not appear at all. Could be related to my setup, not sure though. It’s not a type of site that I find that useful because I delete my history when Firefox closes and I do not like that those records would be stored – albeit privately – on a website.

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If you visit a video on Youtube often for example, you will have a hard time just typing “you” in the address bar and finding it in the list, since people generally visit a lot of videos. There is a way that you can clean these from the history (and stuff you don’t want Mom and Dad to see).

Martin has done a post previously on finding visited URL’s through the index.dat file for Internet Explorer, now I would venture to add to that a bit by expanding it to Firefox, and suggesting a way of editing the document to your needs. Here we go:

First of all, you need to find your profile folder. This table will show you the default directory in most operating systems, follow the link and open up your profile directory. Find the file named “history.dat” and open it, using any text editor. Now open up the replace dialog (most likely ctr+h will do the trick) and replace the unwanted URL with nothing, leave the “replace with” part blank. Replace all entries, and now these will not show up in the URL.

Sadly it is very hard to replace everything with nothing, except a specific URL. This would be more helpful, since I know I visit video X and video Y on Youtube a lot, but not all the 33 others. I am surprised I haven’t seen any software for this, if someone knows of one please do share. Alternatively you may be able to use some basic programming with the help of an advanced text editor like Notepad++ do do this, but I think that’s getting a bit complicated.

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