Rewrite last modified date when unzipping archive

datefilesosxzip

Is there a way to rewrite the last modified date of all the files inside a .zip file to the date of extraction?

Basically, whenever someone unzips the archive, the last modified date of all files is changed to the date of the zip extraction?

Best Answer

With libarchive bsdtar (supports all sorts of archive formats, including pkzip's), use the m flag:

bsdtar xmf file.zip

From the manual:

-m, --modification-time
(x mode only) Do not extract modification time. By default, the modification time is set to the time stored in the archive.

Note that the m flag is not specific to bsdtar, it was already there in the first implementation of tar in Unix V7 in 1979. What is specific to bsdtar is the support for archive formats other than tar.

With unzip, see the -DD option.

Related Solutions

Do any archive utilities exist that can preserve the date created file attribute on NTFS-3G

You could safe the times in a separate file:

(cd /path/to/ntfs/fs && getfattr -n system.ntfs_times -R .) > times

And to restore the times:

(cd /path/to/ntfs/fs && setfattr --recover=-) < times

Linux – Change File’s ‘Date Created’ and ‘Last Modified’ Attributes

You can use the touch command along with the -r switch to apply another file's attributes to a file.

NOTE: There is no such thing as creation date in Unix, there are only access, modify, and change. See this U&L Q&A titled: get age of given file for further details.

$ touch -r goldenfile newfile

Example

For example purposes here's a goldenfile that was created with some arbitrary timestamp.

$ touch -d 20120101 goldenfile
$ ls -l goldenfile 
-rw-rw-r--. 1 saml saml 0 Jan  1  2012 goldenfile

Now I make some new file:

$ touch newfile
$ ls -l newfile 
-rw-rw-r--. 1 saml saml 0 Mar  7 09:06 newfile

Now apply goldenfile's attributes to newfile.

$ touch -r goldenfile newfile 
$ ls -l goldenfile newfile
-rw-rw-r--. 1 saml saml 0 Jan  1  2012 newfile
-rw-rw-r--. 1 saml saml 0 Jan  1  2012 goldenfile

Now newfile has the same attributes.

Modify via Samba

I just confirmed that I'm able to do this using my Fedora 19 laptop which includes version 1.16.3-2 connected to a Thecus N12000 NAS (uses a modified version of CentOS 5.x).

I was able to touch a file as I mentioned above and it worked as I described. Your issue is likely a problem with the either the mounting options being used, which may be omitting the tracking of certain time attributes, or perhaps it's related to one of these bugs: