Keychain access via OS X cli

October 17, 2006 2:27 PM

Is there any way to access one's OS X Keychain via the command line?

I'm at work, and I need access to my Keychain to recall a password. My Mac is on at home, and I can ssh into it, but that's all.

I can download and install software via the command line at the moment.

Thanks in advance for any help y'all can give.

posted by action man bow-tie to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Best answer: Type in:

man security

There's a good overview of security written by the developer of Textmate.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 3:05 PM on October 17, 2006

Response by poster: Hey, thanks for the answer, BP. can you tell me why this doesn't show up with apropos keychains, or even apropos security?

I think this is at least the second time this has happened , where the appropriate command exists, and I've had to ask on a forum to find out about it.

Seems like OS X doesn't build a very complete whatis.db by default, or something is wrong with both of my machines.

Is that the case?
posted by action man bow-tie at 3:42 PM on October 17, 2006

Hey, thanks for the answer, BP. can you tell me why this doesn't show up with apropos keychains, or even apropos security?

Good question. I wish I had an answer.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 3:54 PM on October 17, 2006

"can you tell me why this doesn't show up with apropos keychains, or even apropos security?"

As far as I can tell, this is because Apple's makewhatis is broken. It gets confused by the .Nd from for /usr/share/man/man1/security.1 (which looks correct to me)

Excerpted from the output of a makewhatis -v:
reading /usr/share/man/man1/security.1
ignoring junk description ""

It looks like a lot of stuff is getting left out of whatis.db, based on how many manpages this chokes on.
posted by majick at 4:58 PM on October 17, 2006