I have had gFTP installed for…for practically as long as I’ve used Linux, which is about 10 years. Different distros, different computers, but I’ve always just copied the contents of my /home, or simply put it on a separate partition in the first place. I have passwords saved in gFTP, but I have absolutely no idea what they are. I suppose I could’ve used Wireshark or something like I did at work to get the Earthstink FTP login from whatever had saved it, but there had to be an easier solution. I found a script that claimed to do it, but I could never get it to work; it hadn’t come with any instructions. The dude had written it in C, then someone who preferred to remain anonymous ported it to Python with this message:

please don’t attach my name to it. it’s horrible, awful code. Consider it public domain, do with it as you wish.

LOL. Anyway, I tried a couple of years ago, but could never get it to work. I found some instructions this morning, but they didn’t work, either. Then, I found German dude’s instructions to “descrumble”, and the script works just fine…as long as you know how to us it! He called it “decode” and I called it “descramble”, but I’m putting his instructions here because I don’t want to forget…

if you want to descrumble gftp passwords from the bookmark file you can use the command decode.py

you need to search for the password=$SOMETHING inside of the bookmark file. Than you code use the

decode.py \$SOMETHING

to decode the password. But keep in minde to escape the $ for shell users. You need to add a leading backslash to the password. Otherwise there will be no useful output.

All I had to do was copy the scrambled text from the password saved in the bookmarks file in ~/.gftp, and paste it in with the backslash to comment out the $. Works just fine, and now I can migrate my Parview blog to my buglady domain! Thank you, nameless German dude!