Good ol’ plist files. They are at the core of OS X for storing applicationsettings and they work really well.

If you have ever automated part of your OS X build or changed some cool hiddenfeature, you have probably used the defaults command to do so. Thedefaults command is great and is still recommended for simple things, but ifyou want to edit complex plist structures like arrays, dicts and nestedstructures, you’ll inevitably come across PlistBuddy.

The tool is extremely simple to use and powerful, but due to the lack oftutorials and guides, I thought I’d write one in my own words.

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Start by installing rlwrap to get readline support:

And now start Plistbuddy wrapped in readline glory:

This creates a fresh plist file with a dict as its top-level structure. At anypoint, you may type Print to view the entire structure:

Let’s create a regular item at the top level:

And now change it’s value:

Next up, we’ll create an array and push a few items onto it:

We may also add items to the beginning of the array by inserting at index 0:

And now, we’ll delete an entry:

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Now let’s create a more complex data structure:

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We may also print a subset of a structure by using colons to move further in:

You may use an index to move into an array:

And naturally, you can delete items at any level using colons to get inside:

You may save all your hard work when done:

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These commands may be invoked from the CLI directly using the -c option:

If you would like to modify plist files provided by applications, you’ll needto provide PlistBuddy the full path name to the file (unlike the defaultscommand):

Oh and a little tip (after you stretched for that shift key on each command).The commands (i.e. Print, Set, Add and so on) are case insensitive, so you canjust type them in lowercase.

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Hope this helps someone out there. Have a good one! :)