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I'm trying to open the listchanges.db file located under /var/lib/apt/ with DB Browser for SQLite under Debian 9.1 with KDE and it says: "Invalid file format."
How can I open it?

mYnDstrEAm
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  • Please [edit] your question and clarify. Where is this file? What does it come from? What made you think it is a SQL file? – terdon Jul 26 '17 at 15:45

1 Answers1

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listchanges.db, as used by apt-listchanges, is a Berkeley DB database, not a SQLite database:

$ file /var/lib/apt/listchanges.db
/var/lib/apt/listchanges.db: Berkeley DB (Hash, version 8, native byte-order)

You can dump its contents (albeit not in a particularly human-readable format) using

db5.3_dump /var/lib/apt/listchanges.db | less

For human-readable output, use

apt-listchanges --dump-seen
Stephen Kitt
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  • Thanks. It's very short and there's nothing of interest in there. I thought it was for a file history / changelog of the _sources.list_ file because of its name and as there's also a listchanges.conf file in the same directory as that file. (I was interested in this as I wanted to see what exactly I had in there earlier for [my question here](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/381567/getting-this-repository-does-not-have-a-release-file-on-freshly-installed-debi); it would be useful.) – mYnDstrEAm Jul 27 '17 at 22:52
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    It gets bigger, at least if you use `apt-listchanges` ;-). If you want to keep a history of `sources.list`, use `etckeeper`; but that won’t help you find older contents (older than when you start using it). – Stephen Kitt Jul 27 '17 at 22:58