I'm trying to add one year to the modification and creation dates to all files of a folder.
I found many examples to modify a whole date (not only the year).
How can I add one year to the creation/modification to all files in a folder?
I'm on OS X.
- 3Which OS and filesystem are you using? Depending on that, you probably won't be able to modify or even get the creation time.muru– muru2019-06-29 17:27:33 +00:00Commented Jun 29, 2019 at 17:27
- 1@muru I'm on OS Xoya2020– oya20202019-06-29 17:37:32 +00:00Commented Jun 29, 2019 at 17:37
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2 Answers
touch has an adjust option (-A), but that is sadly limited to 99 hours, 99 minutes, and 99 seconds. But repeated applications can get you what you want:
in Bash:
# assume a year is 365 days for day in {1..365}; do touch -A 240000 folder/* done # on a mac with Xcode cmdline tools installed, # set creation time to mtime: for f in folder/* ; do SetFile -d "$(GetFileInfo -m $f)" $f done 
- 1Thank you for your answer. I'm on OS X and this command didn't work :(oya2020– oya20202019-06-29 17:37:55 +00:00Commented Jun 29, 2019 at 17:37
- 1I'm on macOS as well. It works for me. In what way did it not work? Error message?L. Scott Johnson– L. Scott Johnson2019-06-29 17:40:16 +00:00Commented Jun 29, 2019 at 17:40
- 1My bad : I only typed -A 240000 without the loop. Thank you ! your script is awesome.oya2020– oya20202019-06-29 17:42:51 +00:00Commented Jun 29, 2019 at 17:42
- 1I noticed that only the modification date is modified. How it's possible to modify the creation date as well?oya2020– oya20202019-06-29 17:44:13 +00:00Commented Jun 29, 2019 at 17:44
- 1@oya2020 use
SetFilefor that: apple.stackexchange.com/a/99599/205028muru– muru2019-06-29 17:47:36 +00:00Commented Jun 29, 2019 at 17:47
If you're using GNU date, you can try something like
for file in *; do echo "$file" $(date -d "$(date -r $file) 1 year"); done (this really ought to be cleaned up for special characters and formatting) You're not going to get creation date on most file systems.
