Examining Berkeley DB files from the CLI

linux command-line-interface berkeley-db
mercutio picture mercutio · Sep 1, 2008 · Viewed 59.5k times · Source

I have a set of Berkeley DB files on my Linux file system that I'd like to examine.

What useful tools exist for getting a quick overview of the contents? I can write Perl scripts that use BDB modules for examining them, but I'm looking for some CLI utility to be able to take a look inside without having to start writing scripts.

Answer

cdauth picture cdauth · Dec 20, 2015

Use the db_dump program. It is contained in the package core/db (Arch), db-util (Debian, Ubuntu), sys-libs/db (Gentoo, note that here the binary is called db4.8_dump or whatever version you are using).

On some systems the man pages are not installed, in that case the documentation can be found here. By default, db_dump outputs some hex numbers, which is not really useful if you are trying to analyse the content of a database. Use the -p argument to change this.

Show everything that’s in the file database.db:

db_dump -p database.db

List the databases in the file database.db:

db_dump -l database.db

Show only the content of the database mydb in the file database.db:

db_dump -p -s mydb database.db

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