A list of the various command line 'util' programs

Jul 20, '05 08:10:00AM

Contributed by: adams4

You may have already seen hints on mdutil (used to control Spotlight) and textutil (10.4 text utility). Here's a whole slew of additional utilities, as shown by the command whatis *util* (the trailing * isn't necessary, but who knew if there was some other utility that didn't end with util).

The output you get with the above command looks like this:

drutil(1)                - interact with CD/DVD burners
escputil(1)              - maintain Epson Stylus inkjet printers
hdiutil(1)               - manipulate disk images
mdutil(1)                - manage the metadata stores used by Spotlight
niutil(1)                - NetInfo utility
plutil(1)                - property list utility
smbutil(1)               - interface to the SMB requester
textutil(1)              - text utility
textutil(n)              - Procedures to manipulate texts and strings
tiffutil(1), - tiffutil(1) - manipulates tiff files
Now all you need to do is get the man pages for each of them (the manual for hdutil is very long!) for more info on how they each work.

[robg adds: We've run separate hints on most of the programs in the above list. However, I thought it was worth sharing the full list in this simple hint, as you may have missed some of these. I hadn't heard about escputil, for instance...]

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