MacOS – How to change all dates on file and preserve them during file move

filefilesystemmacos

I would like to change all dates on a file [all four reported by stat command].
I cannot find a way to change the "inode last changed" date.
I've tried:

touch -t
SetFile -d
SetFile -m

but this single date remains unchanged.

Also, is there any way to move file between directories and leave all of the dates intact?
I am moving whole directories, with lots of files inside, so I would prefer to have a single command to do so, if not – I will read the date upfront and set it after the move.

Best Answer

You cannot controlctime.ctime is set with the creation of the inode. ctime changes to the mtime when you modify a file. ctime is set to the current date and time when you modify the inode metadata, such as changing mtime, file permissions, or renaming a file.

The closest you can come to matching atime,mtime, and ctime would be totouch a file which will set all three to the current date and time. But at anytime ctime may change, even OS X applications can cause changes to the inode metadata without changing the content of a file.

btime or birthtime will not change when moving files on the same filesystem.

Tools that support preserving file metadata are ditto, pax, and cp with the p option. None of these tools support preserving birthtime across filesystems.

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MacOS – “Libraries” (a la Windows 7) on OS X

I was looking into doing this also today, and so far the only solution I've found is to use a smart folder, hacked to search multiple locations:

What you want to do is open one of your folders (eg. /Volumes/Portable Library/Resources/) hit CMD+F and then set your desired filtering. eg. I set mine to Kind > Folders.

Save the search as a smart folder (it doesnt matter where) then open up that smart folder in TextEdit and look for the following:

/Volumes/Portable Library/Resources/`

There will be multiple instances of the above string, you want to replace them all with new strings that contain the paths you want to search.

In your case it would look like this:

<string>~/Resources/</string>
<string>/Volumes/Portable Library/Resources/</string>
<string>/Volumes/FreeNAS Server/Resources/</string>

Save the file, then when you open the smart folder it will display search results form all three folders.

If you use the column view in Finder you can move through these folders as if they are all together.

Unfortunately the downside of this is that its searching resursively, so you will get all the folders within your first three, plus any folders in those. I'm yet to find a way to disable recursive search yet...

Program, or workflow to update a single file and update all instances of it everywhere else

What you are describing might be accomplished with a hard link.

Hard links mean that one file on the drive is seen as a file in multiple folders.

So, if you had a file recipe.doc and stored in your ~/Documents folder, you could hard link it elsewhere - perhaps /Users/Shared and ~/Projects/Cooking/Pasta/recipe.doc

So, the link count would be 3 for that file and only one recipe would take space on the disk. If you deleted the file in /Users/Shared - rather than deleting the file, it just removes that one link and decrements the file counter to 2. When the last link goes away, you have a link count of 1 and the file remains, but no copies in other folders.

If you want to learn more, the link command is a terminal command written as ln.

Also, you could check that file into some sort of code control system like git and script the checkout in the folders of your liking. It really depends on how much time you'll save or if you just want to write a quick and dirty shell script to push the changed file elsewhere (or use rsync to copy just the changed bits and be über efficient).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MacOS – “Libraries” (a la Windows 7) on OS X

Program, or workflow to update a single file and update all instances of it everywhere else

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