I sometimes need to look at a cookies.txt file and figure out what the entries mean.

Basically, you have a line in the file that looks like:

www.someURL.com FALSE / FALSE 0 VNAME v,value,and,more

  • www.someURL.com – The domain that the cookie applies to
  • FALSE – can other webservers within www.someURL.com access this cookie? If there was a webserver at blah.www.someURL.com, could it see this cookie?
  • / – more restrictions on what paths on www.someURL.com can see this cookie. Anything here and under can see the cookie. / is the least restrictive, meaning that any (and all) requests from www.someURL.com get the cookie header sent.
  • FALSE – Do we have to be coming in on https to send the cookie?
  • 0 – expiration time. zero probably means that it never expires, or that it is good for as long as this session lasts. A number like 928934729 would correspond to a number of seconds since the epoch (Jan 1, 1970).
  • VNAME – The name of the cookie variable that will be send to the server.
  • v,value,and,more – cookie value that will be sent. Might be comma separated list of terms, or could just be a word.. Hard to say. Depends on the server.
Be Sociable, Share!

Related posts:

  1. Shrinking the size of a PDF file We are printing a large (multi-hundred megabytes) pdf file, and...
  2. Nifty GMail attachment trick Everyone out there probably already knew this, but I just...
  3. Controlling Kids or, Tough Love vs. Spanking So I just got this via email while ago. I...