dscacheutil(1) General Commands Manual dscacheutil(1)

dscacheutilgather information, statistics and initiate queries to the Directory Service cache.

dscacheutil -h

dscacheutil -q category [-a key value]

dscacheutil -cachedump [-buckets] [-entries [category]]

dscacheutil -configuration

dscacheutil -flushcache

dscacheutil -statistics

dscacheutil does various operations against the Directory Service cache including gathering statistics, initiating lookups, inspection, cache flush, etc. This tool replaces most of the functionality of the lookupd tool previously available in the OS.

A list of flags and their descriptions:

Lists the options for calling dscacheutil
category
Initiate a query using standard calls. These calls will either return results from the cache or go fetch live data and place them in the cache. By default if no specific query is requested via -a then all results within that category will be returned.
key value
Optional flag to -q for a specific key with a value.
Dumps an overview of the cache by default. Additional flags will provide more detailed information.
Used in conjunction with -cachedump to also print hash bucket usage of the current cache.
[category]
Used in conjunction with -cachedump to dump detailed information about cache entries. An optional category can be supplied to only see types of interest. Dumping 'host' entries can only be done by administrative users.
Prints current configuration information, such as the search policy from Directory Service and cache parameters.
Flushes the entire cache. This should only be used in extreme cases. Validation information is used within the cache along with other techniques to ensure the OS has valid information available to it.
Prints statistics from the cache including an overview and detailed call statistics. Some calls are not cached but are derived from other calls internally. Cache hits and cache misses may not always be equal to external calls. For example getaddrinfo is actually a combination of gethostbyname with other calls internally to the cache to maximize cache hit rate.

Available categories and associated keys:

group
name or gid
host
name or ip_address (used for both IPv6 and IPv4)
mount
name
protocol
name or number
rpc
name or number
service
name or port
user
name or uid

Lookup a user:
% dscacheutil -q user -a name jdoe
name: jdoe
password: ********
uid: 501
gid: 501
dir: /Users/jdoe
shell: /bin/csh
gecos: John Doe
Lookup all users:
% dscacheutil -q user
Dump cache overview:
% dscacheutil -cachedump
Dump cache details with user entries:
% dscacheutil -cachedump -entries user

DirectoryService(8), dsmemberutil(1)

January 14, 2007 Darwin