Where does Safari 6 store cookies?

Question

Seems like Safari 5 would store cookies in ~/Library/Cookies/Cookies.plist - but cookies will remain present in Safari even after exiting Safari, removing this file, and then restarting Safari.

Where does Safari 6 store cookies?

edit: corrected the path - Libraries (plural) was a typo.

Solution

The file ~/Library/Cookies/Cookies.plist (note that it's Library, not Libraries) does not exist with Safari 6, and I'm pretty sure Safari 5.1 didn't use it anymore either.

Safari stores Cookies in ~/Library/Cookies/Cookies.binarycookies now, which is no longer a plain text Preference List file, but a binary file from the NSHTTPCookieStorage class that is not human-readable.

If you want to decipher it and learn more about the file format, take a look at this Stack Overflow answer.

Comments

[slhck]

I still wonder why this file doesn't show up in fseventer when accessing websites.

[brevno]

It's shown by fseventer for me when for example refreshing this page, but it takes a few seconds.

[cwd]

I did see it in sudo fs_events with grep -i cookie, however I tried deleting this file (before asking the question) but it seems like it did not "clear the cookies" for Safari 6. Thoughts?

[slhck]

Should have mentioned what you've tried in your question. I'm pretty sure Safari stores the application state somewhere else as well @cwd – is your actual question how to delete cookies from the file system? If so, it'd be helpful to ask exactly that.

[cwd]

hmm, yes i should have. thanks! superuser.com/questions/376194/…