MacOS – Batch command to change each file’s creation date to match the information in the file name

So after some hunting I stumbled on this little AppleScript on Mac OS X Hints. Thanks Krioni! I'm sure with some tinkering I could modify it to work with my filenames, but I just batch edited the image filenames to fit in with the script.

on open files_
    repeat with file_ in files_
        tell application "Finder"
            set file_name to name of file_
            set od to AppleScript's text item delimiters
            set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {"_"}
            set new_creation_date to second text item of file_name
            set new_creation_date to new_creation_date & "1000"
            set file_ to POSIX path of file_
            do shell script "touch -t " & new_creation_date & " " & quoted form of file_
            set AppleScript's text item delimiters to od
        end tell
    end repeat
end open

It simply looks for the second text item of the filename in between underscores and uses that as the date. It then adds "1000" as the time to the touch command. Hopefully this will help someone else out there.

The original thread can be found here.

You're lucky because the numbers in your file names are in just the order touch -t needs.

This command in the terminal will work. You just need to make sure your working directory is set to the folder you want to do:

for f in *; do
    t=$(echo $f | sed -E 's/([A-z]*-)|([ ,;])|(\..*)//g' | sed -E 's/(.*)(..)/\1.\2/')
    touch -t $t "$f"
done

To break it down:

for f in * sets the variable f to the name of each file in the directory, in turn.

do puts everything until the done into the for loop.

t=$(…) sets the variable t to the output of the commands in the parentheses.

The first sed command matches any letters before a - symbol, the - ; and the space symbols, and the file extension, and deletes them.

The second sed command inserts a period between the mm and ss values, as touch requires.

touch -t $t $f changes the file modification and creation times to the value of t on the file f.

Tested on some dummy files with whatever version of sed ships with Mavericks.