plutil(1)

🌸 NAME 🌸

Okay bestie, meet plutil(1) from the General Commands Manual — the Property list utility. That's the whole name line, but now with main-character energy. 💅

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

progname [-command] [-options] file

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

The plutil utility edits property lists, verifies the syntax, and converts from one format to another. If - is given as the file path, stdin and stdout are used.

First up is the action to perform — pick one:

• -p — Print the whole plist to stdout, in the human-readable GNUStep format.
• -lint — Verifies the plist can be parsed.
• -convert FMT — Converts the plist to another format. FMT can be one of:
  • xml1 — Apple XML.
  • binary1 — Apple binary.
  • openstep — OpenStep (untyped human-readable).
  • gnustep — GNUStep (typed human-readable).
  • json — JSON (lossy human-readable).

The NSPropertyListFormat names are accepted too.

• -insert PATH KEY Value — the page gives this exact signature and no extra description under it. Keeping it exactly as-is, bestie. 🫶

The default action is -lint.

The general options are:

…and then the page literally stops listing. No general options follow in the source, so I'm not inventing any. 😭

A plutil “keypath” is a dot-separated chain of keys for traversing a plist object. An empty keypath refers to the object itself. The format of keys conform to that of GNUStep plist string literals.

🧚 IMPLEMENTATION NOTES 🧚

• Quoted strings in the keypath is a GNUStep extension.
• The Objective-C and Swift literal output formats are not yet implemented.

💀 EXIT STATUS 💀

(Nothing listed here on the page — no invented status tea. 🙈)

🌈 EXAMPLES 🌈

(Nothing listed here on the page either. Tragic, but we move. 💀)

💬 DIAGNOSTICS 💬

(No diagnostics listed here on the page. Zero extra claims, periodt.)

🔗 SEE ALSO 🔗

• pl(1)
• pldes(1)

👑 AUTHORS 👑

This version of plutil was written by Mingye Wang <arthur2e5@aosc.io>.

plutil first appeared in Mac OS X 10.2. It received path-related capabilities around Mac OS X 10.13.

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Signed, sealed, slayed: this plutil(1) page is from Debian, dated September 23, 2020. Mwah 💋