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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Notice: This article was published on December 7, 2010 and the content above may be out of date.
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