plutil

Erica Sadun | 10:22 am | October 14, 2007 | Utilities, Software, iPod touch, iPhone

My new version of plutil replaces 3 previous Erica Utility components: txt2plist, plist2txt and dump-plist. This more closely resembles the plutil on OS X. (Do a man plutil at the command line for Mac details.)

Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to do multi-letter switches so -convert has become -c in my version. I also added a key query option, -v which returns the value for a given key.

And, unlike the previous versions, plutil can work on any number of property lists. So if you want to convert all the plists in a folder to, say, XML format, issue plutil -c xml1 *.plist.

Here is the current help file:

plutil: [command_option] [other_options] file...
Command options are (-l is the default):
 -h             show this message and exit
 -l             output a list of the properties
 -c fmt         rewrite the property list in format
 -v key         retrieve the value for key
                fmt is one of xml1 binary
Other options are not yet implemented.