I have written a few posts in the past about parsing data from property list files in scripts and Terminal. My usual tool for this is PlistBuddy. However, PlistBuddy’s syntax is… well… eccentric.
Recently, Alexis Bridoux, who is also the main developer on Octory, introduced a command line tool called scout which solves many of the issues I have with PlistBuddy.
For example, you can pipe the output of another command into scout, something you can only convince PlistBuddy to do with some major shell syntax hackery.
So instead of this:
> /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "print :dsAttrTypeStandard\:RealName:0" /dev/stdin <<< $(dscl -plist . read /Users/armin RealName)
With scout I can use this much clearer syntax:
> dscl -plist . read /Users/armin RealName | scout "dsAttrTypeStandard:RealName[0]"
The tool can also modify existing files, by changing, adding or deleting keys.
scout can also parse JSON and (non plist) XML files, so it can also stand in as a replacement for jq and xpath. It will also color-code output for property list, XML and JSON files.
I have been using scout interactively in the Terminal for a while now. So far, I have been refraining from using scout in scripts I use for deployment. To use a non-system tool in deployment scripts, you need to ensure the tool is deployed early in the setup process. Then you also have to write your scripts in a way that they will gracefully fail or fallback to PlistBuddy in the edge case where scout is not installed:
scout="/usr/local/bin/scout"
if [ ! -x "$scout"]; then
echo "could not find scout, exiting..."
exit 1
fi
realName=$( dscl -plist . read /Users/armin RealName | scout "dsAttrTypeStandard:RealName[0]" )
All of this overhead, adds extra burden to using a tool. The good news is that scout comes as a signed and notarized package installer, which minimizes deployment effort.
I wills be considering scout for future projects. If anyone at Apple is reading this: please hire Alexis and integrate scout or something like it in macOS.