I stumbled over these option this morning. I do not know when they were introduced, but I can see the options in 10.11 and 10.12. You can see them yourself with plutil -help. (The options are not listed in the man page.) Note: Managing and editing Property List files and preferences is covered in much more detail … Continue reading Editing Property Lists with plutil
For change, this was a week without an update, security or otherwise. MacAdmins have still been busy doing and sharing their research. Thank you all so very much for all the great articles. (Sponsor: Mosyle) The only Apple Unified Platform for Business Mosyle is the only solution that fully integrates Enhanced MDM, Endpoint Security, Internet … Continue reading Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2023-04-21
The other day on Twitter, I got a question about a flag for the readlink command that I was not familiar with. As it turns out, the readlink command (which tells you where a symbolic link points to) got an update in macOS 12.3 and now has a -f option. With this new option, readlink … Continue reading Some CLI updates in macOS Monterey
Apple has announced that in macOS 10.15 Catalina the default shell will be zsh. In this series, I will document my experiences moving bash settings, configurations, and scripts over to zsh. Part 1: Moving to zsh Part 2: Configuration Files Part 3: Shell Options Part 4: Aliases and Functions Part 5: Completions (this article) Part … Continue reading Moving to zsh, part 5: Completions
As mentioned before, the recommended way of gaining super user privileges from the command line in macOS is the sudo command. The name means ‘super user do’ and will perform the following command with root privileges after verifying the user running sudo has the permission to do so. Part 1: Demystifying root Part 2: The … Continue reading Demystifying `root` on macOS, Part 2 — The `sudo` Command
Last week, fellow MacAdmin Kyle Crawford has discovered that on macOS High Sierra the defaults will delete a property list file with invalid plist/XML syntax, even when you just attempt to read data. Erik Holtham has a more detailed OpenRadar bug. Patrik Wardle has found the relevant code, which deletes the file when it doesn’t … Continue reading defaults – the Plist Killer
For more info on plutil and everything property list related read my book: ‘Property Lists, Preferences and Profiles for Apple Administrators’ macOS and Finder use extended attributes to store plenty of extra information about files. For example, when you download a file in Safari, it stores when a file was downloaded and which website and … Continue reading Parse Binary Property Lists in Finder Metadata
AutoPkg needs to load all recipes in the search paths on every run so it can locate recipes and their parents (which may be spread over different repositories). Because of this, AutoPkg may fail if a single recipe has malformed property list syntax. To locate the one broken property list among many, you can use … Continue reading Check all AutoPkg Recipes
In my book “Packaging for Apple Administrators” I show a great use of pkgbuild to wrap an application in a package installer: $ pkgbuild –component /Applications/Numbers.app Numbers.pkg If the application is not already in the /Applications folder, you have to add the –install-location: $ pkgbuild –component /Volumes/Firefox/Firefox.app –install-location /Applications Firefox.pkg This is great and wonderful, … Continue reading Relocatable Package Installers and quickpkg Update
Continuing in my informal series of Terminal articles, I’d like to visit two tools that help interact from the shell to a particular part of the macOS UI: the clipboard. The clipboard is the ‘place’ where macOS stores anything you cut (⌘X) or copy (⌘C). Later the system reads from the clipboard (and possibly converts … Continue reading Terminal and the Clipboard
