Appendix B. LDAP Data Interchange Format

Red Hat Directory Server (Directory Server) uses the LDAP Data Interchange Format (LDIF) to describe a directory and directory entries in text format. LDIF is commonly used to build the initial directory database or to add large numbers of entries to the directory all at once. In addition, LDIF is also used to describe changes to directory entries. For this reason, most of Directory Server's command-line utilities rely on LDIF for either input or output.

Because LDIF is a text file format, LDIF files can be created using virtually any language. All directory data is stored using the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode. Therefore, the LDIF files created must also be UTF-8 encoded.

For information on using LDIF to modify directory entries, see Chapter 3, Managing Directory Entries.

dn: distinguished_name 
objectClass: object_class 
objectClass: object_class 
...
 attribute_type[;subtype]:attribute_value
...