The LDAP Data Interchange Format (LDIF) is a standard plain text data interchange format for representing Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directory content and update requests.
LDIF was designed in the early 1990s by Tim Howes, Mark C. Smith, and Gordon Good while at the University of Michigan.
RFC 4525, authored by Kurt Zeilenga, extended LDIF to support the LDAP Modify-Increment extension.
JXplorer is a cross platform open source java application that can browse and do basic editing of LDIF files.
The final "-" is required by Microsoft's LDIFDE tool, but not needed by most ldif implementations.