Reading user Plist files from /var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/users

Identifying user accounts in macOS (Catalina) can be achieved using the following command

 dscl . -list /Users | grep -vE '_|root|nobody|daemon|Guest'

Which gives me the below output.Note: hiddenswasti is a hidden account (not visible in the login/welcome screen) while swastibhushandeb is a normal account.

Referring to a post here ,it is inferred that the user specific plist files residing in var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/users can be read using defaults read or plutil -p and contains valuable information to ascertain if an account is hidden or otherwise.

Issue I am facing is to develop a one liner code (using bash )is utilizing the output of the dscl command detailed above and use generated output as input to plutil -p to read the contents of hiddenswasti.plist and swastibhushandeb.plist. Would appreciate help.Thanks in advance.

Solution 1:

You can try this to loop through the users.

USER_PLIST="/var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/users"

for user in $(dscl . -list /Users | grep -vE '_|root|nobody|daemon|Guest'); do 
  sudo defaults read ${USER_PLIST}/${user}.plist
done 

This sets up a for loop with your dscl output and feeds those usernames to defaults. You can easily substitute plutil, if you prefer. You can make this a one-liner by using the semicolon between carriage returns. I left that out to make it easily readable.

HTH.