After my dad died, I wanted to be able to have access any of his online accounts going forward. My dad was a Safari user and used iCloud Keychain to sync his credentials across his devices. I don’t want to have to keep an OS X user account around just to access his accounts, so I wanted to export his credentials to a portable file.

This is the process I used to create a CSV file of his credentials in the format “example.com,user,pass”. This portable format would be pretty easy to import into 1Password or Safari in the future.

The way I went about this isn’t great; it opens up more opportunities for apps to control one’s Mac through Accessibility APIs, it writes plaintext passwords to disk, and it could use some cleaning up. A better approach might leverage the security command line tool that ships with OS X. That said, I found this method to be a fun illustration of what’s possible us