May 11, 2017

History from Free Dictionary and Aard2 Android Dictionary apps

I use Free Dictionary and Aard2 for in my Android phone to look up the meaning of words. If you ever need to get the list of words that were looked up in these apps from a Linux system, you may find this useful.


The first step would be to enable connect the phone to the computer and enable USB debugging.

Free Dictionary

adb shell run-as org.freedictionary cat shared_prefs/FreeDictionary.xml | 
xmlstarlet sel -T -t -v /map/string | tr ',' '\n' 

Aard2 Dictionary
Things are bit complicate for Aard2 as I found that it does not support run-as command.

adb backup -f ./aard2.ab -apk itkach.aard2
java -jar abe.jar unpack aard2.ab  aard2.tar
tar -O -xvf  aard2.tar apps/itkach.aard2/r/app_history 2>
  /dev/null | jq -r '.key'