View Pidgin Chat Logs On Your Linux Terminal

If you want to look on your pidgin chat history/conversations in linux, you can easily find the logs in the below location.

# cd ~/.purple/logs/

 Pidgin’s chat logs (chat histories) are saved in HTML files. In the above path, you find more directories to what you actually need.

For example: A Jabber account with username stebu.johny@domain.com‘s log will be found in this path.

You can find various users that the user have chatted with.

Example:

darelegacy stebu.johny@domain.com # pwd
/home/darelegacy/.purple/logs/jabber/stebu.johny@domain.com

darelegacy stebu.johny@domain.com # ll
drwx------  2 darelegacy darelegacy  4096 Mar 18 05:03 abhijith.pm@domain.com
drwx------  2 darelegacy darelegacy  4096 Jun  6 13:55 abhilash@domain.com
drwx------  2 darelegacy darelegacy  4096 Apr 10 08:40 abin@domain.com
drwx------  2 darelegacy darelegacy  4096 Jun  3 13:07 ajay.joseph@domain.com

Go to the directories that you want to check the logs.

Example: 

 # cd abhijith.pm@domain.com

You'll get the log files for that user.

Example:

 -rw-r--r--  1 darelegacy darelegacy   912 Mar  5 07:21 2014-03-05.005451+0530IST.html
-rw-r--r--  1 darelegacy darelegacy  3404 Mar  7 06:47 2014-03-07.033705+0530IST.html
-rw-r--r--  1 darelegacy darelegacy 23804 Mar 18 05:14 2014-03-18.050323+0530IST.html

Open the .html log using the command below.

  # elinks -dump -dump-color-mode 1 <file>.html

Thats it. :-)