What is the difference between ldapsearch and etautil
All Identity Manager
Short answer.
etautil is a wrapper around the different ldap tools (ldapsearch, ldapadd, ldapmodify, ldapdelete)
Long answer
etautil works against provisioning server (default port 20389). Ldapsearch can be used to access either provisioning server (default port 20389) or provisioning directory (default port 20391).
Accessing provisioning directory directly is faster than accessing the data via provisioning server.
Using ldaptools that modify data against provisioning directory (port 20391) can break it and should never be attempted.