How can I get list of open tabs in Firefox via a command-line application?

Question

I have a lot of tabs open in Firefox. After I close Firefox and then run it again, the tabs are there. That's all right.

However, from time to time, Firefox crashes and my tabs are lost. How do I get the open tabs and backup the list to some file?

(With tabs in a file, I can also use Git, SVN, or whatever to store them and optionally find some link 'that I saw in my browser but can't remember what it was'.)

What I got so far:

I'm able to get some URLs, but that's doesn't seem to be exactly what I see in Firefox:

$c = ((gc c:\Users\..\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xfvj8vd5.default\sessionstore.js ) -join '')
$sess = [Jayrock.Json.Conversion.JsonConvert]::Import( $c.trim('()') )
$sess.windows[0].tabs |
  % { $_.entries } |
  % { $_.url } |
  Select-Object -Unique

Please, don't tell me "use this addon or that addon". I really would like do it as I described.

Answer 1

Using the JSON module from PoshCode, this looks right (bear in mind: I tested this on Firefox 4, where the Tab Panorama results in "hidden" tabs, ymmv).

ConvertFrom-Json -File ~\AppData\R*\M*\F*\P*\*\sessionstore.js -Type PSObject -EA 0 |
Select -Expand Windows | Select -Expand Tabs | 
Where { !$_.hidden } | ForEach { @($_.Entries)[-1] } | 
Select Title, Url

All the * in the first line are just to make it short. Feel free to expand that to the full path if you care about the (milli)seconds spent searching.

Answer 2

not in PowerShell but I recently faced this problem so maybe this onliner can help someone:

cat recovery.js | sed 's#{"url":"#\n\n#g' | cut -d'"' -f1 | grep . | sort -u

Answer 3

#Test in Firefox 5.0
$sessionStoreFile = "$env:APPDATA\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\*.default\sessionstore-backups\recovery.js"
$sessionStoreFileExists = Test-Path $sessionStoreFile
If($sessionStoreFileExists -eq $False) {
    #Test in Firefox 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0
    $sessionStoreFile = "$env:APPDATA\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\*.default\sessionstore.js"
}
(Get-Content -Encoding UTF8 -Raw -Path $sessionStoreFile).Trim('()') | ConvertFrom-Json |
Select -Expand Windows | Select -Expand Tabs | 
Where { !$_.hidden } | ForEach { @($_.Entries)[-1] } | 
Select Url, Title | Export-Csv -Path $CsvFile  -Encoding UTF8  -NoTypeInformation   

You can download detail SQL script from how to export all URLs of Firefox tabs at once(PowerShell)