Find, xargs, commands

[benwiggy]

I'm trying to do something really basic, but I just can't seem to get it right. I want to find a bunch of files, and then perform a command on them.
The find criterion is "Creation Date = 1970 1 Jan", so:

find * \! -newerBt 19700102

That seems to work. The command I want to run is:

SetFile -d "$(GetFileInfo -m ${a})" ${a}

(Set the Creation Date to the Modified Date.)

So I tried:

for a in $(find * \! -newerBt 19700102); do SetFile -d "$(GetFileInfo -m ${a})" ${a}; done

But I get "GetFileInfo: could not refer to file (-43)"

When I try replacing the action with "echo", I get the filenames divided by spaces, despite my best efforts to avoid that. I then tried:

for a in $(find * \! -newerBt 19700102 -print0); do xargs -0 echo "$a"; done

which just hangs.

I tried

find * \! -newerBt 19700102 -print0 | xargs -0 GetFileInfo -m

and I get a "usage" error for GetFileInfo

I'm probably making a complete mess of this. I've flicked through some Shell script sample sites to find something similar, but with limited success.

Any help greatly appreciated.

[SirDice]

Try this:

find * \! -newerBt 19700102 -exec SetFile -d "$(GetFileInfo -m {})" {} \;

[benwiggy]

Thanks, but I get "ERROR: invalid date/time".

What's weird is that "GetFileInfo -m <file>" works on its own as a command in the Terminal, but as soon as you use wildcards, it doesn't. So "GetFileInfo -m *" doesn't work.

[SirDice]

All roads lead to Rome

find * \! -newerBt 19700102 | while read file; do
 echo ${file}
 info = `GetFileInfo -m ${file}`
 SetFile -d "${info}"
done

[benwiggy]

Quote: Originally Posted by SirDice All roads lead to Rome

Not all, in this case!

usage: GetFileInfo [-P] [-a[<attrib-letter>] | -t | -c | -d | -m] <path>
ERROR: invalid date/time

I was wondering whether there was a way to do it without the Apple-specific, Xcode-only Apple commands.
I can get the date with:

stat -f %Sm -t %Y%m%d

But touch doesn't seem to change the creation date, despite plenty of websites claiming that it does.

[ganbustein]

Quote: Originally Posted by SirDice All roads lead to Rome find * \! -newerBt 19700102 | while read file; do echo ${file} info = `GetFileInfo -m ${file}` SetFile -d "${info}" done

You can't put whitespace around the = in an assignment. (I've also replaced backticks with a $( ... ) construct, just because I find it more readable. It's also more flexible, in that $( ... ) can be nested without horrendous quoting.)

Plus, you forgot to quote the filename, which might contain whitespace or other shell-meaningful characters.

And you left the filename off the SetFile command.

find * \! -newerBt 19700102 | while read file; do
 echo "$file"
 info=$(GetFileInfo -m "$file")
 SetFile -d "$info" "$file"
done

[benwiggy]

Great. That works just fine.

Thanks.

[SirDice]

I typed it from the top of my head.