Flat, sequential text files have columns of information delimited from each other with a variety of characters:

123.45.67.89      here.our.domain       /etc/hosts uses a whitespace
nobody:*:65534:65534::/:                /etc/passwd uses a colon

The -z switch can be used to specify a delimiter whenever the default delimiter of whitespace is not appropriate. In the case of the /etc/passwd file, a database declaration might look like this:

Kuid text -z: -k2 -v0 /etc/passwd  # map to convert user-id to login name

The default is whitespace for the text type. It is a comma for the netinfo type.

For the ldap type, a -z switch specifies the character to use to separate values when building the resulting string when multiple attribute values are returned.