catplist

catplist is a small python utility to print apple plists (Information Property List) in a readable and comprehensible manner.

Rationale

While plistutil exists to convert plists from binary to xml and vice versa plists are usually still hard to read for humans or parse from the command line with tools like grep. catplist aims to make this task easier. It's main focus is to print a human-readable and parsable representation of the plist. Additionally, plists often contain binary data, or some strange nested key value structures originating from NSArchiver or NSKeyedArchiver serialization. catplist aims to deliver a good readable representation by unwrapping those structures.

Try it on some Metadata out of your iPhone Photo library like *.albummetadata, *.memorymetadata, *.facemetadata, *.foldermetadata or just regular *.plist files.

For editing and more accurate/original representation of plists or search for PlistBuddy, XCode, plutil.

Features

• wildcard support
• recurse into directories with option --recurse
• reads binary and xml plists
• NSKeyedArchiver: unpacks NSKeyedArchiver plists that just add an layer of indirectness into the key value store.
• Nested plists: in some plists apple stores plist as a value. catplist unwraps those nested plists.
• Interpretation of some of Binary Data stored within plists, usually consisting of:
  • UUID data
  • xz compressed data
  • binary plists

Usage

catplist myplist.plist

> catplist --help
Usage: catplist [OPTIONS] [FILE]...

  This is catplist: print plists for human reading and easy grepping.

Options:
  -R, --raw                       print raw plist contents, will not unpack
                                  nested data & plists
  -r, --recurse                   recurse into subdirs, reads all files ignores
                                  non plist files
  -f, --format [python|json|yaml]
                                  format output in ...
  --help                          Show this message and exit.

Install

Installation via PyPi:

pip install catplist

Known Bugs

• valid plists with a date in year 0 will not be read since the underlying python datetime implementation is currently not allowing year 0 dates. See also Python Issue 41083