getting info from plutil

Question

I'm having trouble direction info from plutil. I want to check if a .plist contains the key CFBundleShortVersionString. I don't think plutil has any option to test for if a key exists so I thought I would just plutil -show file.plist >file.txt but that just plain doesn't work. :/ So I tried to direct the plist file from stdout to file with the dump option plutil -dump file.plist >file.txt with no luck. :/ I also tried directing the stdout to stderr and stderr and stdout to file. Nothing worked. How do I do this?

Answer 1

Oneliner which doesn't depend on extra utility to install:

plutil -extract CFBundleShortVersionString xml1 -o - ./Info.plist | sed -n "s/.*<string>\(.*\)<\/string>.*/\1/p"