freebsd man page for property

PROPERTIES(3)						   BSD Library Functions Manual 					     PROPERTIES(3)

NAME
     properties_read, property_find, properties_free -- functions to allow creating simple property lists from ASCII file data

LIBRARY
     System Utilities Library (libutil, -lutil)

SYNOPSIS
     #include <libutil.h>

     properties
     properties_read(int fd);

     char *
     property_find(properties list, const char *name);

     void
     properties_free(properties list);

DESCRIPTION
     typedef struct _properties {
	     struct _properties *next;
	     char *name;
	     char *value;
     } *properties;

     The function properties_read() reads name = value pairs from the file descriptor passed in fd and returns the head of a new property list,
     assuming that the file's contents have been parsed properly, or NULL in case of error.

     The property_find() function returns the associated value string for the property named name if found, otherwise NULL.  The value returned
     may be up to PROPERTY_MAX_VALUE bytes in length.

     The properties_free() function is used to free the structure returned by properties_read() when it is no longer needed.

FILE FORMAT
     Each property in the file is assumed to have the format of name = value where name is an alphanumeric string (and any punctuation not includ-
     ing the `=' character) and value is an arbitrary string of text terminated by a newline character.  If newlines are desired, the entire value
     should be enclosed in { } (curly-bracket) characters.  Any line beginning with a # or ; character is assumed to be a comment and will be
     ignored.

AUTHORS
     Jordan Hubbard

BUGS
     Simplistic.

BSD
								  October 7, 1998							       BSD