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<p dir="auto">On 24 Jan 2023, at 14:50, John Doherty via mailmate wrote:</p>
</div><div class="plaintext" style="white-space: normal;"><blockquote style="margin: 0 0 5px; padding-left: 5px; border-left: 2px solid #777777; color: #777777;"><p dir="auto">Do not know when "old-style ASCII" plists were superseded by "Apple binary."</p>
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<p dir="auto">They have coexisted for a very long time and to all intents and purposes are equivalent.</p>
<p dir="auto">I don’t believe the original readable form is ever going away, though it may give way in popularity to json instead of the “old” xml. The binary version is an optimisation to assist with rapid launch of applications. My understanding is that either format will be used by any application given this is built into the relevant system supplied module.</p>
<p dir="auto">And while talking xml(aka. plist)/binary there is command line tool that does the conversion: xml/plist <> json <> binary <> other</p>
<pre style="margin-left: 15px; margin-right: 15px; padding: 5px; background-color: #F7F7F7; border-radius: 5px 5px 5px 5px; overflow-x: auto; max-width: 90vw;"><code style="margin: 0 0; border-radius: 3px; background-color: #F7F7F7; padding: 0px;">NAME
plutil – property list utility
SYNOPSIS
plutil [command_option] [other_options] file
...
DESCRIPTION
plutil can be used to check the syntax of property list files, or convert a plist file from one
format to another. Specifying - as an input file reads from stdin.
…
-convert fmt Convert the named file to the indicated format and write back to the file system.
If the file can't be loaded due to invalid syntax, the operation fails. This is
the only option to support objc swift formats.
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<p dir="auto">Regards<br>
Gavan</p>
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