Recover tmp flash videos (deleted immediately by the browser plugin)

for h in `find /proc/*/fd -ilname "/tmp/Flash*" 2>/dev/null`; do ln -s "$h" `readlink "$h" | cut -d' ' -f1`; done

Newer versions of the flashplayer browser plugin delete the tmp flash video immediately after opening a filehandle to prevent the user from "exporting" the video by simply copying the /tmp/FlashXYZ file. This command searches such deleted flash videos and creates symbolic links to the opened filehandle with the same name as the deleted file. This allows you to play your flash-videos (from e.g. youtube) with e.g. mplayer or copy the buffered video if you want to keep it.

Sample Output

ls /tmp/Flash*

By: hons

2011-03-02 09:43:42

cut ln

1 Alternatives + Submit Alt

Keep a copy of the raw Youtube FLV,MP4,etc stored in /tmp/

Certain Flash video players (e.g. Youtube) write their video streams to disk in /tmp/ , but the files are unlinked. i.e. the player creates the file and then immediately deletes the filename (unlinking files in this way makes it hard to find them, and/or ensures their cleanup if the browser or plugin should crash etc.) But as long as the flash plugin's process runs, a file descriptor remains in its /proc/ hierarchy, from which we (and the player) still have access to the file. The method above worked nicely for me when I had 50 tabs open with Youtube videos and didn't want to have to re-download them all with some tool.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
8

lsof -n -P|grep FlashXX|awk '{ print "/proc/" $2 "/fd/" substr($4, 1, length($4)-1) }'|while read f;do newname=$(exiftool -FileModifyDate -FileType -t -d %Y%m%d%H%M%S $f|cut -f2|tr '\n' '.'|sed 's/\.$//');echo "$f -> $newname";cp $f ~/Vids/$newname;done

mhs · 2012-02-25 01:49:45 6

What Others Think

Simple idea, yet so powerful!!! Basically, the fact of using the /proc filesystem for recovering deleted files is the point. The rest of the stuff, I find it a bit of sugar around a beautiful idea...

xakon · 724 weeks and 1 day ago

Very slick :)

linuxrawkstar · 723 weeks and 6 days ago

WONDERFUL! This is just great.. thanks a lot

brausen · 710 weeks and 4 days ago

I agree with xakon; this is good for a lot more than youtube videos -- I've always wondered if there was a way to access deleted inodes while a process still had them open, now I know :) BTW, the lsof command can be useful for finding out which process has a file open, e.g. lsof | grep Flash does much the same thing as that find command.

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