You can add any file or folder there by just dragging it from the Finder window below. Can be quite useful for quick access to specific folders or applications (if you really need them very often).
To remove just Command-drag the name from onto the desktop and release the mouse button to see it disappear in a cloud of smoke.
You can use xattr. This copies the tags from file1 to file2:
xattr -wx com.apple.metadata:_kMDItemUserTags "$(xattr -px com.apple.metadata:_kMDItemUserTags file1)" file2
xattr -wx com.apple.FinderInfo "$(xattr -px com.apple.FinderInfo file1)" file2
The tags are stored in a property list as a single array of strings:
$ xattr -p com.apple.metadata:_kMDItemUserTags file3|xxd -r -p|plutil -convert xml1 - -o -
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<array>
<string>Red
6</string>
<string>aa</string>
<string>Orange
7</string>
<string>Yellow
5</string>
<string>Green
2</string>
<string>Blue
4</string>
<string>Purple
3</string>
<string>Gray
1</string>
</array>
</plist>
The tags for colors have values like Red\n6 (where \n is a linefeed).
If the kColor flag in com.apple.FinderInfo is unset, Finder doesn't show the circles for colors next to files. If the kColor flag is set to orange and the file has the red tag, Finder shows both red and orange circles. You can set the kColor flag with AppleScript:
do shell script "xattr -w com.apple.metadata:_kMDItemUserTags '(\"Red\\n6\",\"new tag\")' ~/desktop/file4"
tell application "Finder" to set label index of file "file4" of desktop to item 1 of {2, 1, 3, 6, 4, 5, 7}
'("Red\n6","new tag")' is old-style plist syntax for this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<array>
<string>Red
6</string>
<string>new tag</string>
</array>
</plist>
xattr -p com.apple.FinderInfo file|head -n1|cut -c28-29 prints the value of the bits used for the kColor flag. Red is C, orange is E, yellow is A, green is 4, blue is 8, magenta is 6, and gray is 2. (The flag that would add 1 to the values is not used in OS X.)
Best Answer
Create a file with the tags that you wish to apply to a certain set of files that will match a search string. In the script above, this file is located at
/path/to/tagged-fileand is set on the first line of the script to theorigvariable. Replace this with the path to the file that you've created.On the second line of the script, change the path to the path of the containing folder that you wish to search through. This will be set to a variable called
folder.On the third line, set the string to search for in the name of the file.
*abc*will match123abc123.txt.The fourth line and beyond is actually a single line that runs the find command to find the matching files then xattr to copy the tags from that original file to every file found.