Re: new auth errors at ao3 with lynx.

Thorsten Glaser <[email protected]> Sun, 30 Nov 2025 14:14:01 +0000 (UTC)

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.web.lynx.devel
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Hi Karen,

I’m getting them as well. I think AO3 did something that now
requires Javascript, as it works in Firefox.

To log in, I now log in in Firefox, exit Firefox, and then
use a small script (included below) to extract the cookies
and copy them to lynx’ cookie jar. You’ll likely need help
from someone experienced with the Unix commandline for that.

Doing kudos, commenting, etc. is not possible with lynx at
the moment, but I’m mostly glad I can still read.

If everything else fails, https://fichub.net/ can still
download AO3 stories, as it does for FFN stories.

.

The script itself (ffgetcookies) is included as an attachment.
It needs mksh and sqlite3 installed, and one needs to either have
only one Firefox profile or call it with the name of the right
cookies.sqlite file to dump.

The output is in lynx (Netscape) cookie jar format, and one
needs to grep for archiveofourown and copy the corresponding
lines into the lynx cookie jar while lynx is not running(!).

Careful when copying, the format uses both tabs and spaces,
so make sure to not change the tabs to spaces accidentally,
or it won’t work.

Good luck,
//mirabilos
-- 
„Cool, /usr/share/doc/mksh/examples/uhr.gz ist ja ein Grund,
mksh auf jedem System zu installieren.“
	-- XTaran auf der OpenRheinRuhr, ganz begeistert
(EN: “[…]uhr.gz is a reason to install mksh on every system.”)

ffgetcookies (text/plain, 2 KB)

#!/bin/mksh
# © mirabilos Ⓕ MirBSD or CC0

# determine path to cookies.sqlite file
db=
if [[ -z $1 ]]; then
	# profile, if there is only a single one
	for x in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/cookies.sqlite; do
		[[ -e $x ]] || continue
		if [[ -n $db ]]; then
			print -ru2 "E: ambiguous databases"
			for x in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/cookies.sqlite; do
				print -ru2 "N: ${x@Q}"
			done
			exit 1
		fi
		db=$x
	done
elif [[ -e $1 ]]; then
	# filename, direct
	db=$1
elif [[ -e ~/.mozilla/firefox/$1/cookies.sqlite ]]; then
	# fully qualified profile name
	db=~/.mozilla/firefox/$1/cookies.sqlite
elif [[ $1 != */* ]]; then
	# human-readable profile name or profile identifier
	for x in ~/.mozilla/firefox/{$1.*,*.$1}/cookies.sqlite; do
		[[ -e $x ]] || continue
		if [[ -n $db ]]; then
			print -ru2 "E: ambiguous databases"
			for x in ~/.mozilla/firefox/{$1.*,*.$1}/cookies.sqlite; do
				[[ ! -e $x ]] || print -ru2 "N: ${x@Q}"
			done
			exit 1
		fi
		db=$x
	done
fi

# realpathise as sqlite3(1) has no support for --
[[ -z $db || ! -e $db || ! -f $db || ! -s $db || ! -r $db ]] || \
    db=$(\\builtin realpath -- "$db") || exit 1

# arriving at plausible pathname, with OS/2 support?
if [[ $db != ?([A-Z]:)/* || ! -e $db || ! -f $db || ! -s $db || ! -r $db ]]; then
	[[ -n $db ]] || db=$1
	print -ru2 "E: no database: ${db@Q}"
	exit 1
fi

# run query
exec sqlite3 -bail -batch -init /dev/null -noheader \
    -list -nullvalue '\N' -readonly -separator $'\t' "$db" <<\EOF
SELECT IIF(SUBSTR(host, 1, 1) = '.', SUBSTR(host, 2), host),
    IIF(SUBSTR(host, 1, 1) = '.', 'TRUE', 'FALSE'),
    path,
    IIF(isSecure > 0, 'TRUE', 'FALSE'),
    expiry, name, value
FROM moz_cookies
WHERE host IS NOT NULL AND host != ''
  AND path IS NOT NULL AND path  != ''
  AND expiry IS NOT NULL
  AND name IS NOT NULL AND name != ''
  AND value IS NOT NULL AND value != ''
ORDER BY IIF(SUBSTR(host, 1, 1) = '.', SUBSTR(host, 2), host),
    path, name;
EOF