from Mac - Finer Things in Tech http://finerthings.in/mac/ Author: David Chartier Date: May 02, 2012 at 04:55PM

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There's a lot of conflicting information about how to set networking information (such as DNS resolution configuration) from the terminal. In the course of setting up a VPN package (openvpn) on OS X, I had to set the DNS resolution configuration dynamically from a shell script.

As of (at least) 10.3, /etc/resolv.conf (or /var/run/resolv.conf) is NOT the place to do this. Re-writing /etc/resolv.conf resulted in a system where a DNS lookup with host would work, but dig and ping would not. Sometimes /etc/resolv.conf would be magically restored to its original configuration. I thought the smarter option would be in the NetInfo database, except on my machine, I had no resolver configuration hiding there.
,br> The answer? OS X has a daemon called configd, which magically collects configuration information, sends notifications, and maintains a dynamic database of the current settings. The host command would read my hacked-up /etc/resolv.conf, but smarter DNS lookups would query the network configuration database from configd.

The command-line tools to interface with the configuration daemon are scselect and scutil. scselect provides a list of defined network locations (as in the Network preference pane) and allows you to choose between them. scutil enables much more fine-grained control over the current network configuration. Unfortunately, it only really offers a command-line interface to modify the configuration database. To use scutil from a bash script, you must dynamically create an scutil script as a text file, and pipe it to scutil.

The following sample scutil sessions perform some useful tasks...

To retrieve the current primary network interface:

### Description

In Mac OS X 10.3, Apple introduced a new scheme for identifying data types called [Uniform Type Identifiers][1].

One requirement that Mac OS X puts on any application that wants to use these identifiers is that it declare them in its Info.plist—not just in [CFBundleDocumentTypes][2] and [NSServices][3], but also in [UTImportedTypeDeclarations][4] and [UTExpertedTypeDeclarations][5]. Otherwise, Mac OS X 10.4 and later will ignore your application's uses of those UTIs elsewhere in your Info.plist.

This creates a lot of work for you, especially when importing a type declaration. Exporting a new declaration is easy, because it's your type: you can make up whatever you want. But to import a declaration, you must gather information about it and construct the dictionary yourself. This gets tedious, especially for some types (such as image types) that you may import in one application after another.

UTI Property List Helper is an application to solve this problem for you.

![The UTI Property List Helper window contains a table view, wherein you enter the UTIs, and two text views: one showing the CFBundleDocumentTypes array, and the other showing the UTImportedTypeDeclarations array.][6]


Simply add types to the list in the upper half of the window, and UTI Property List Helper will automatically update the two arrays in the lower half. When you're done, either select and copy each array's XML text into your Info.plist, or save it to a file.

### Mercurial repository

If you want to contribute bug-fixes or enhancements to UTIPropertyListHelper, the easiest way to do that is to clone [the Mercurial repository for UTIPropertyListHelper][7]. To do this, type this command into a terminal:

hg clone http://boredzo.org/uti-plist-helper/hg UTI-Plist-Helper

I provide UTIPlistHelper—the application, and its source code—under a three-clause BSD license. For more information, see the file named LICENSE.txt that comes with it.

[1]: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/understanding_utis/
[2]: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPRuntimeConfig/Articles/PListKeys.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20001431-101685
[3]: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPRuntimeConfig/Articles/PListKeys.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20001431-107265
[4]: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPRuntimeConfig/Articles/PListKeys.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20001431-114192
[5]: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPRuntimeConfig/Articles/PListKeys.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20001431-SW7
[6]: http://boredzo.org/UTI_Plist_Helper.png
[7]: http://boredzo.org/hg

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