Where To Find Empathy Chat Logs
I was looking for some quick help at the Ubuntu IRC channel* today when someone hopped on and asked where the chat logs for Empathy could be found. About a month ago, I remember I was also asking myself the same question. It wasn’t really important that time so I did a half-hearted search and eventually forgot about it when I couldn’t find it quickly.
One of the people in the channel answered that the Empathy chat logs can be found at this location – ~/.gnome2/Empathy/logs. A Google search on the Ubuntu forums also came up with the same answer, although I bet that wasn’t really a thorough search and the guy just went with the first link that had a path to where the logs supposedly are to be found, and pasted it on channel chat. The Ubuntu forum link also was an old one, dating back May 2009, and obviously that was 2 Ubuntu versions ago.
I got curious. When I did an `ls` on the .gnome2 directory there was no Empathy sub-directory to be found. Strange. Was my Empathy configured not to save chat logs? I don’t remember changing anything, and there isn’t much to be configured with Empathy > Edit > Preferences anyway. Plus I could still access both my older and newer conversations with an F3 on the Empathy window, which means it was still actively logging everything.
This time, I thoroughly searched for the “missing” Empathy chat log within the myriad of hidden directories of my Home dir, and this time I didn’t do it manually. Thanks to `find` the search was over after a few seconds. Yes that is a recursive use of find, and honestly, I just tried it a while back and it worked. I don’t know of a more efficient way to do it so leave a message if you do. The command shown in the screenshot is:
find . -type d -name [Ee]mpathy -exec find {} -name logs \;
And lo! There it is, the logs found. It is under ~/.local/share/Empathy/logs.
So was the default path to save the logs changed over the course of 2 Ubuntu upgrades? Is it different from one Ubuntu install to another? The one I’m using right now is Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx.
*The official Ubuntu Help on IRC is on irc.freenode.net at #ubuntu
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5 Responses to “Where To Find Empathy Chat Logs”
December 8, 2010 at 1:19 am »
Which blogs do you read regularly?
December 13, 2010 at 11:33 pm »
That is some inspirational stuff. Never knew that opinions could be this varied. Thanks for all the enthusiasm to offer such helpful information here.
March 28, 2011 at 3:06 am »
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April 23, 2012 at 12:00 pm »
If I were to merge the chat log folder from my old hard drive (Ubuntu 10.04) into the chat log folder on my new hard drive (Ubuntu 12.04), what do you think are the chances that I would be able to use Empathy to search through all my conversations?
April 23, 2012 at 1:54 pm »
If the chat log format of the versions of Empathy on Ubuntu 10.04 and the one on Ubuntu 12.04 are the same, then I do not see any reason why searching for conversations would fail. On the other hand if the developers of Empathy provided backwards compatibility to previous versions assuming that the formats are different, then you’re still on the safe side.
Oh, and you have to consider if the logs are using the same directory and same files to read/write the logs.I do remember that after I upgraded from Natty to Oneiric I could still access my Empathy chat logs from before the upgrade.