Netinfo was always a kind of anachronism - a directory database stored on a collection of flat files works well enough, but surely we can do better than that in this new millenium of disposable paper clothing, genetically modified vegetables of every hue, and the perennial (and personal favortite) flying car. Hey, I saw the Jetsons. I know how it's going to be.

Well Apple agrees. Over the last few releases of OS X, they've been quietly mothballing Netinfo, and replacing it with Open Directory. All well and good, but with the inevitable removal of the old way of doing things, there are a few, well, snags. It used to be possible to look in Netinfo Manager and get all kinds of wonderful information on users, groups, permissions et al, and tinker around with them in a quick, simple, and efficient way. Of course, most of the time it was equally easy to do something terrible and accidentally break things in a quick, simple and efficient way; Netinfo tinkering sometimes necessitated the actual blood sacrifice of a chicken (or goat with the server product) in order to ensure the desired results.

Now, however, we have to do it all through the command line, which is all well and good, as it's sufficiently intimidating to give one pause before hacking away merrily. Firing up the Terminal is a wonderful way of doing very granular adjustment of your system, but it does have the side effect of making you feel like you're doing Something Terribly Important. Let's start small. To pull up a list of all the users on your machine, type in:

dscl . list /users

What you're doing here is telling the command (dscl) to look at the local domain (.) and list (list) the users (/users - self explanatory really).

I'd recommend reading the man page for dscl if you're likely to want to do any serious work configuring your local users and their permissions. It's also something worth knowing if you work with Server, although for most jobs the regular GUI tools offer a good fit for adjustments.