New Macintosh Utility: plhelper

Erica Sadun | 2:00 pm | November 4, 2007 | Macintosh, Utilities, Software

On Shaun Erickson’s request, I’ve put together plhelper, a Universal binary application for the Mac. Plhelper does much of what plutil does–and is in fact based on my iPhone port of that program–but also allows you to do three things that plutil does not. You can look up a value by key (-v), you can set a value by key (-s -v), and you can create a new plist (-t, to “touch”).

% /usr/local/bin/plhelper
plhelper: [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
-t create new property list(s) and exit
-c fmt rewrite the property list in format
fmt is one of xml1 binary1
-v key retrieve the value for key
-s key set the value for key with the option given in -v
(always outputs to xml)
Other options are not yet implemented.