A Bash Shell Script to Update Firefox Nightly

Posted by acrossad on Jan 11, 2012 5:00 PM EDT
Djere.com; By Rex Djere
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I recently migrated from Firefox to the more cutting edge Firefox Nightly. As its name implies, Firefox Nightly is updated on a nightly basis. The reason for my switch initially was to get access to a 64-bit version of Firefox on my Windows 7 system. I fell in love with Nightly, so much so that I now use it on ALL of my computer systems. Unfortunately, there is no yum repository for Nightly yet (as far as I know), so I can't update Nightly automatically. My solution was to write my own Bash shell script to semi-automate the process. I just run the script once a day (late in the day so that I run it after the daily update). The script downloads the latest Nightly build for GNU/Linux, unpacks it, installs it, and then deletes all of the downloaded files.

WARNING: The script DOES overwrite the files in your Firefox directory. On Fedora 16, this directory is /usr/lib64/. I have run the script several times myself, and my profile was left intact. The script just updated the browser's executable and functional files. All of my saved passwords, bookmarks, history, etc. were left intact. In other words, the script worked perfectly. In fact, the script successfully upgraded my Fedora 16 laptop from Firefox 9.01 to Nightly 12.0a1 (2012-01-10)!

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