3.5 Directory Services Utilities

This chapter demonstrates four Directory Services utilities: dscl , nireport , nidump , and niload . Table 3-1 describes these and other NetInfo utilities.

The nidump and nireport utilities display the contents of the local directory. niload loads the contents of flat files (such as /etc/passwd or /etc/ hosts ) into Directory Services. niutil directly manipulates the Directory Services database; it's the command-line equivalent of NetInfo Manager. To make changes, use sudo with these commands or first log in as the root user. The commands that can be performed as a normal user are shown without the sudo command in the examples that follow.

Unlike other ni* utilities, nicl acts directly on the database files. Consequently, you can use nicl to modify the local directory even when Directory Services is not running (such as when you boot into single-user mode).

Table 3-1. NetInfo tools

Tool	Description
dscl	Provides a command-line interface to Directory Services.
nicl	Provides a command-line interface to NetInfo.
nidump	Extracts flat file format data (such as /etc/passwd ) from NetInfo.
nifind	Finds a NetInfo directory.
nigrep	Performs a regular expression search on NetInfo.
niload	Loads flat file format data (such as /etc/passwd ) into NetInfo.
nireport	Prints tables from NetInfo.
niutil	NetInfo utility for manipulating the database.

When you use any of these utilities you are making potentially dangerous changes to your system. But even if you trash the local directory with reckless usage of these commands, you can restore the NetInfo database from your last backup. For more details, see the Section 3.11, later in this chapter. To back up the local NetInfo database, use the command:

 nidump -r / -t localhost/local > backup.nidump