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I need a script to set the creation date to the modification date for a bunch of files created by my sound recorder - any way to do this? Running Mac OS X 10.4.11
Setting file creation date in Mac OS X
Answers
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You can use SetFile on the command line to do this however it is not included by default in Mac OS X 10.4.x (Tiger). If you have installed the Developer Tools or most of the Combo updates it is installed but in a non standard location. SetFile was included in /usr/bin/ for Mac OS X 10.5 and later.
To find the command you can try using locate to find the location.
Assuming you have the Developer Tools installed:
/Developer/usr/bin/SetFile -d '12/31/2008 12:00:00 PM' nameoffile.txt
You can use another program called GetFileInfo that is installed with SetFile to obtain the modification date.
/Developer/usr/bin/GetFileInfo nameoffile.txt
An example script for one file:
#! /bin/bash
# Usage: nameOfThisScript.sh nameOfFile.txt
modifiedDate=`/usr/bin/GetFileInfo -m $1`
/usr/bin/SetFile -d "$modifiedDate" $1
Chealion
Posted 2009-11-12T21:57:17.797
Reputation: 22 932
1Thanks a lot Chealion! Just what I was looking for. Here's the script so far:
#!/bin/bash
for i in /Users/MacHD/Music/h2dropbox/*
do
modifiedDate=/Developer/Tools/GetFileInfo -m $i
/Developer/Tools/SetFile -d "$modifiedDate" $i
echo $i
done – None – 2009-11-16T19:13:09.547
Just to help you find a solution: this is stored in the "HFS meta data", in
– Arjan – 2009-11-13T08:43:27.607kMDItemFSCreationDate. (UNIX by itself has no notion of a creation date. See http://superuser.com/questions/43310/os-x-unix-shell-command-possible-to-get-last-opened-date-of-file/43319#43319 for some details, but that doesn't describe how to change it.)