1

Hello,
I'm using the 5.9.2 compiler and accompanying programs.
I tried to use plutil to look at some binary plists recently that came from an iOS 15.8 device, and the plutil utility appears buggy: It seemingly doesn't parse command-line arguments at all and always prints the usage info.
Looking at the executable's symbols I noticed that it was coded in Swift, so I assume it came with the compiler tarball.
If so, does anyone know if this issue has been fixed in 5.10? If so, I will just upgrade.
Thanks.

2

plutil is not part of the Swift toolchain. Apple is gradually porting all of macOS to Swift.

3

OK but I'm a Linux user, and the plutil that I have was written in Swift.
So, what part of the Swift project does it come from?
I'm guessing that the plutil on MacOS is based on the same source code but doesn't have this bug, because plutil is used a lot on MacOS, and a bug this basic wouldn't go unfixed very long on MacOS.
So why the discrepancy between runtime behaviors on Linux and MacOS?

4

It comes from the swift-corelibs-foundation repo, which isn't built on macOS, so it may have diverged from the one on macOS. Looking at the commit log for that file, it was not changed in 5.10 or much recently in trunk either, so it has not been fixed recently.

That said, it is difficult to know what's going wrong without an example. Can you paste the output of a working command on macOS that is failing with the same input on linux?