On 26. Jul 2007, at 16:39, Robin Houston wrote:
On 25/07/07, Allan Odgaard throw-away-1@macromates.com wrote:
Just for the records; the result of 'defaults' looks like old-style plist, but it is not. As of such, the result is only useful as a human-readable format.
Surely it is at least useful for reading single preference items, e.g.
last_root=$(defaults read -app TextMate NSNavLastRootDirectory)
in a shell script?
Not really, e.g.:
% defaults write test foo bar && defaults read test foo bar
% defaults write test foo 'æble' && defaults read test foo \346ble
% defaults write test foo '⌘' && defaults read test foo \u2318
So in addition to the coercing of integers, booleans, and dates into strings, there is the problem that non-ASCII strings are returned using escape codes for the non-ASCII part.