plutil for beginner

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tmx3 Author

Level 1

75 points

plutil for beginner

could someone talk me through checking a prefernce file via plutil please?
Many thanks

mac pro, Mac OS X (10.5.6)

Posted on Mar 15, 2009 12:40 PM

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Answer 1

Mar 15, 2009 1:33 PM in response to tmx3

Hi

If I understand you correctly then issuing:

plutil -help

Reveals:

plutil: [command_option] [other_options] file...
Command options are (-lint is the default):
-help show this message and exit
-lint check the property list files for syntax errors
-convert fmt rewrite property list files in format
fmt is one of: xml1 binary1
There are some additional optional arguments:
-s be silent on success
-o path specify alternate file path name for result;
the -o option is used with -convert, and is only
useful with one file argument (last file overwrites);
the path '-' means stdout (use with XML output only).
-e extension specify alternate extension for converted files
-- specifies that all further arguments are file names

Issuing:

plutil /Users/username/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Finder.plist

Reveals:

/Users/username/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Finder.plist: OK

You can specify the -lint argument if you want but if you simply issue plutil it will use the argument by default. The manual page (man plutil) tells you this.

Tony

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Answer 2

tmx3 Author

Level 1

75 points

Mar 15, 2009 2:20 PM in response to Antonio Rocco

cool that worked. i was making a error by dragging the file from the finder which gave the entire path from /, wheras if i type the path from ~ it works fine, or "cd /" then drag the icon also works fine. Thank you. one more thing if i wanted to check an entire directory (e.g. /preferences) is there a command to excecute that?

Message was edited by: tmx3

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