initool

Initool lets you manipulate the contents of INI files from the command line. Rather than modify an INI file in place, it prints the modified contents of the file to standard output.

Operation

Usage

initool get <filename> [<section> [<key> [-v|--value-only]]] — retrieve data
initool exists <filename> <section> [<key>] — check if a section or a property exists
initool set <filename> <section> <key> <value> — set a property's value
initool delete <filename> <section> [<key>] — delete a section or a property
initool version — print the version number

Commands can be abbreviated to their first letter: g, e, s, d, v. When given a valid command, initool first reads the INI file filename in its entirety. If the filename is -, initool reads standard input. For the commands get, delete, and set, it then prints to standard output the file's contents with the desired change. For exists, it reports whether the section or the property exists through its exit status.

Top-level properties (properties not in any section) are accessed by using an empty string as the section name. The exists command with just an empty string as the argument returns whether or not there are any top-level properties.

The order in which properties appear is preserved. A new property is added after the last property in its section.

Initool understands INI file comments (lines starting with ; or #) in the input and preserves them in the output. It also preserves empty lines.

Examples

POSIX

Let's replace the value of the top-level property cache in the file settings.ini from a POSIX-compatible shell. You can do this on FreeBSD, Linux, and macOS.

initool set settings.ini '' cache 1024 > settings.ini.new \
&& mv settings.ini.new settings.ini

You can pipeline invocations of initool to make multiple changes. Enable pipefail in your shell (support information) to handle errors correctly.

set -o pipefail
initool delete settings.ini test \
| initool set - '' cache 1024 > settings.ini.new \
&& mv settings.ini.new settings.ini

Windows

Now let's replace the value of the top-level property cache in the file settings.ini on Windows from the Command Prompt (cmd.exe):

initool set settings.ini "" cache 1024 > settings.ini.new
if %errorlevel% equ 0 move /y settings.ini.new settings.ini

You can use pipelines in the Windows Command Prompt. Note that the Command Prompt has no feature like pipefail. The %errorlevel% will be that of the last command in the pipeline, which in this case cannot fail, so an %errorlevel% check would be pointless. This is a reason to avoid pipelines in batch files.

initool delete settings.ini test | initool set - "" cache 1024 > settings.ini.new
move /y settings.ini.new settings.ini

Both

To retrieve only the value of a property rather than the whole property (the section, key, and value), use the flag -v or --value-only:

$ initool get tests/test.ini foo name1
[foo]
name1=foo1
$ initool get tests/test.ini foo name1 --value-only
foo1

Whitespace

Initool defines whitespace as any mix of space and tab characters. Leading and trailing whitespace around the section name, the key, and the value is removed from the output.

As a result, the following input files are all equivalent to each other for initool and produce the same output. The output is identical to the first input.

[PHP]
short_open_tag=Off

[PHP]
short_open_tag = Off

    [PHP]
        short_open_tag   =     Off

Because of this, you can reformat initool-compatible INI files with the command initool get file.ini.

Nonexistent sections and properties

How nonexistent sections and properties are handled depends on the command.

get
- Result: With the flag --value-only, initool produces no output. Without the flag, initool prints a blank line if the section doesn't exist. Initool prints the section name followed by a blank line if the section exists, but the property does not.
- Exit status: 0.
exists
- Result: No output.
- Exit status: 0 if the section/property exists, 1 if it doesn't.
set
- Result: The section and the property are created as needed.
- Exit status: 0.
delete
- Result: Nothing is removed from the input in the output.
- Exit status: 0.

Line endings

When compiled according to the instructions below, initool will assume line endings to be LF on POSIX and either LF or CR+LF on Windows. To operate on Windows files from POSIX, convert the files' line endings to LF and then back. You can accomplish this, e.g., using sed.

Text encodings

Initool is encoding-naive and assumes one character is one byte. It correctly processes UTF-8-encoded files when given UTF-8 command line arguments but can't open files in UTF-16 or UTF-32. On Windows, it will receive the command line arguments in the encoding for your system's language for non-Unicode programs (e.g., Windows-1252), which limits what you can do with UTF-8-encoded files.

Building and installation

FreeBSD, MacPorts port

You can install sysutils/initool from the FreeBSD ports tree and MacPorts.

Building on FreeBSD, Linux, macOS

Install MLton. It is available as the package mlton in Fedora, FreeBSD, Homebrew, MacPorts, and other repositories. On Debian 12 and Ubuntu 22.04, you will have to build MLton from source.

Clone the repository and run make then sudo make install in it. Initool will be installed in /usr/local/bin. Run sudo make uninstall to remove it.

Building on Windows

Prebuilt Windows (x86) binaries are attached to releases.

To build initool yourself, first install MoSML. The Windows installer is not available on the offical site due to an antivirus false positive. I have mirrored the installer in an attachment to a GitHub comment.

Clone the repository and run build.cmd from its directory.

The test suite currently does not work on Windows.

License

MIT.

alebcay/initool