So I’ve been writing heaps of Python since moving to Google, (well we did hire Guido, what do you expect? :) ) and have been doing a lot of plistlib work, as well as dealing with the Ruby plist stuff.

Why has no-one reverse engineered the binary format yet?

Is it just that it’s really easy to coerce an XML parser into parsing the xml1 format and no-one could be bothered doing the work?

Is it that Apple themselves don’t seem to have documented it?

I’m sick of wrapping plutil -convert commands in try: except: or begin rescue blocks and it’s not always appropriate. Sometimes you want to read the plist before requesting elevated privileges to make changes to it.

Now I think about it, I’ve actually started writing a whole bunch of Ruby wrappers that use PlistBuddy instead, now that it’s at /usr/libexec/ in Leopard. It really annoys me how ‘defaults’ logs to syslog every time you query for a non-existent key, no matter where you redirect stdout/stderr.


#!/bin/bash

# Usage:
# plcat
# or:
# plcat $tempfile
# convert temp file in place
/usr/bin/plutil -convert xml1 $tempfile
else
# plutil doesn't write to stdout, so the result gets saved and then accessed.
/usr/bin/plutil -convert xml1 -o $tempfile $1;
fi
if [ -e $tempfile ]; then
/bin/cat $tempfile;
/bin/rm -i -f $tempfile;
fi


By the way, despite the usage comment, the regular old “plcat file” syntax also works.

% defaults read com.apple.loginwindow

And plutil for plist file manipulation. Naturally, it needs a wrapper too! Here’s the one I use:


#!/bin/bash

# Usage:
# plcat
# or:
# plcat $tempfile
# convert temp file in place
/usr/bin/plutil -convert xml1 $tempfile
else
# plutil doesn't write to stdout, so the result gets saved and then accessed.
/usr/bin/plutil -convert xml1 -o $tempfile $1;
fi
if [ -e $tempfile ]; then
/bin/cat $tempfile;
/bin/rm -i -f $tempfile;
fi


Nicholas’ function looks neater, but isn’t pl deprecated? As you can see from the date, Tom wrote the above script for a not-so-current version of OS X.

But, yes, `defaults` even with its warts, still has an edge at the command line so your function is a good idea.

Another plist-type function I wrote:

plv () {
plutil -convert xml1 -o /dev/fd/1 $1 | /usr/bin/pl
}

useful to view a property list since /usr/bin/pl (even in Leopard) still doesn’t support binary property lists.