carta
plutil(1)

plutil1

Property list utility

Usage

progname [-command] [-options] file

Overview

The plutil utility can be used to edit property lists, to verify the syntax, or to convert from one format to another. If ‘-’ is given as the file path, stdin and stdout are used.

The first part is the action to perform, one of:

-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 default action is ‘-lint.’

The general options are:

The 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

Examples

Diagnostics

History

  • Arch Linux 2026-11-01: the text shown here
  • Debian 13 (Trixie) to Debian 12 (Bookworm)
  • Debian 7 (Wheezy) to Debian 6.0 (Squeeze)

-convert since Debian 12 (Bookworm); -lint since Debian 12 (Bookworm); -p since Debian 12 (Bookworm).

Authors

This version of plutil was written by Mingye Wang ⟨[email protected]⟩. plutil first appeared in Mac OS X 10.2. It received path-related capabilities around Mac OS X 10.13.

From gnustep-base 1.31.1-3 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.