delete cookies which have not been accessed in the last x days

Question

Using Firefox. I would like to get rid of "obsolete" cookies. By "obsolete" I mean cookies which have not been accessed by any website in the last x days.

I have searched high and low but I have not found how to do that. What I have found is, among others:

• restrict the lifetime of all cookies (about:config -> network.cookie.lifetimePolicy).
• whitelist or blacklist domains (firefox preferences -> privacy -> cookie exceptions).
• delete all cookies from the last x hours (firefox history -> clear recent history).

None of that is what I want.

I want to delete all cookies which have not been accessed by any website in the last x days.

Answer 1

The Cookie Time extension can be configured to automatically delete cookies that haven't been used for a specified time (expired). It also has a separate setting to force expire / delete all cookies that are beyond a specified age.

Answer 2

I did some research.

1. Cookies are stored in the cookies.sqlite file in the firefox profile directory.
2. The file is a sqlite database.
3. The timestamp of the last access is stored in the lastAccessed column in the moz_cookies table.
4. The format of lastAccessed is some PRTime format, which is basically the unix epoch time with microseconds.

The following query will list every cookie which has not been accessed in the last 14 days.

select host, name from moz_cookies
where lastaccessed < strftime('%s000000', 'now', '-14 days')
order by lastaccessed;

I just learned some SQL for this, so it might very well be that this query can be done better.

The following query will delete all those cookies.

delete from moz_cookies
where lastaccessed < strftime('%s000000', 'now', '-14 days');

Here is a quick and dirty shell script which does the job. You will need the sqlite3 command installed on your system.

#!/bin/sh

DAYS="14"

SELECT="select host, name"
DELETE="delete"
FROM="from moz_cookies"
OBSOLETE="strftime('%s000000', 'now', '-$DAYS days')"
WHERE="where lastaccessed < $OBSOLETE"
ORDER="order by lastaccessed"

SELECTQUERY="$SELECT $FROM $WHERE $ORDER;"
DELETEQUERY="$DELETE $FROM $WHERE;"

printf '%s\n' "$SELECTQUERY" | sqlite3 cookies.sqlite