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How to delete and create a new firefox profile from TTY1?

2 Answers 2

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To delete all Firefox settings type:

mv ~/.mozilla ~/.mozilla.backup

in a terminal. On next startup Firefox will create a new ~/.mozilla directory for a new session with default settings.

To restore your settings type:

mv ~/.mozilla ~/.mozilla.newbackup
mv ~/.mozilla.backup ~/.mozilla

This way you can create a variety of settings to restore when needed.

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  • This seems to be good idea..+1 here
    – karthick87
    Mar 30, 2011 at 5:54
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WARNING: This will delete everything in the Firefox config - there is no undo.

With that out of the way, to do that, you can run the following in the terminal.

rm -rf ~/.mozilla
rm -rf ~/.cache/mozilla

This will delete local settings and cache, including the extensions.

EDIT: Thanks to one of the comments, there is a way to backup the firefox config. To do that, follow the line below instead.

cd ~/.mozilla && mkdir backup && cp -r ./extensions ./backup && cp -r ./firefox* ./backup && rm -rf ./firefox* ./extensions

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  • It works fine..
    – karthick87
    Mar 29, 2011 at 14:32
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    To have some "undo" it's possible to just rename the directory to some other, so it can be undone later, if it's needed.
    – LGB
    Mar 29, 2011 at 14:32
  • @LGB - Correct.
    – jrg
    Mar 29, 2011 at 14:34
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    When using rm with the r flag, especially when also using the f flag, and especially when providing advice that might be followed by novice users, I recommend avoiding commands that will wipe out the whole home directory if an accidental space is added. In this situation, you can just delete the .mozilla folder along with its contents, by running rm -r .mozilla. Aug 14, 2012 at 9:27

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