Tip: Reading Tiger’s compressed plist files

If you are used to editing plist files, such as application preferences, you’ll find some are now compressed for better performance.

You can decompress them using the utility ‘plutil’ from the terminal.

Open Terminal

type: ‘plutil convert xml1 ‘(Note: without the quotes and following space is important!)

Drag the plist file from the finder into the terminal window, which will put the path to the file in for you

Press return to convert the file

When done you can recompress the file using binary1 in place of xml1 in the example above.