Reading creation date from file an change

rename

I have files named "clip-2016-03-01 10;01;14.mp4" and would like to make filename to creation date of file.

Found this thread
read creation date from file name and change – batch

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

done

But I'm not that used to using terminal.

1. Where do I put the search string to the folder containing the files in terminal?

  1. Also found another thread suggesting that touch command won't work and that I should use SetFile -d command.
    https://superuser.com/questions/492342/how-can-i-batch-shift-the-creation-date-of-files-on-os-x-10-6-8

Best Answer

This will operate on all files in the Current Directory. You could cd ~/MyDirectory, either in the script or in Terminal before running it. Another option is to change the * in for f in *; do to ~/MyDirectory/*

This won't actually give you the creation time, because it isn't stored by Unix. Ctime actually records the time of the last status change (which may or may not be creation time).

OS X seems to store other data in extended attributes, but this is not what the script does.

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