LDIF Tools

What is LDIF?

LDIF, the LDAP Data Interchange Format, is described in RFC 2849, which means that all LDAP-servers out there (more or less) support it.
It's main purpose is to provide a common format to be used by LDAP servers when synchronizing their data, but you can also use it to import new data from an other source.

Roughly, there are two types of LDIF-files:

  1. A static "snapshot" of data
  2. An "update-file", relative to the data already present in a certain server.

OK, now I have an idea of what LDIF is, but how can this program help me?

Imagine you have an LDAP-server containing data that is gotten from another source (an SQL server or something likewise). We can safely assume that the data will not be updated that often, but from time to time (say, once a month or so), you will want to update the LDAP-server to reflect reality again. You could do a few things:

If you choose to do the last option, you've come to the right place: ldifmerge does just that -- it compares two "static" LDIF files, and produces a new file with the update you need to get from the one state to the other. It's also possible to use data from different sources; if you don't want ldifmerge to update certain attributes or entries, you can just supply extra command-line arguments; then ldifmerge will ignore differences in those attributes.

OK, looks good. What else?

Currently, that's it. Nothing else.
However, I'm planning to implement the following:

Never mind, where can I get it?

From the sourceforge project site: http://sf.net/projects/ldiftools/

Copyright © Wouter Verhelst, 2001

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