Change creation date of a file

SetFile -d “09/04/2009 20:26:00” /Volumes/PHOTOS/Video00001.mp4

Those are (should be) vertical double quotes, not the right- or left-double-quotes.

https://ss64.com/osx/setfile.html

I’d probably also quote the file specification if you’re going to be scripting this, as that avoids the escaping.

The 'touch' command DOES NOT know about the Creating Date!

The touch command can change the

• Change file date (used to indicate that file metadata was changed) Internally called ctime
• Modification date (used to indicate file data was changed) Internally called mtime
• Read date (used to indicate the file was opened for read access) Internally called atime

These are all standard Unix file timestamps. Unix does not have a file creation time.

macOS added a Creation time, but the touch command does not know about it.

MrHoffman

has the correct approach using the SetFile command.

How to change a file’s last modified and creation dates on Mac OS X - http://danilo.ariadoss.com/howto-change-date-modified-date-created-mac/

I'll let you decide if it helps or if it is what you are doing already

Although the touch -r works to apply the creation and modification dates between an older and newer document, it only apparently applies the modification date between old and new video files. I just tested this with an older .mkv and newer .mp4.

I believe if you change the single quotes to double quotes, your SetFile command will work — provided that /Volumes/PHOTOS is not a read-only mount point.

Here’s the skeleton of a shell script as a starting point:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/197895/how-to-do-a-batch-change-shift-of-file-creation-date

Tweak that to meet your needs, as you learn more about shell scripting...

The following (untested! brute-force!) bash code should be pretty close ro what you want, for files in the default directory (cd to that location) beginning with the string DSC_:

#!/bin/bash
for f in DSC_*.*; do
    SetFile -m "your-date-spec-here" "$f"
    SetFile -d "your-date-spec-here" "$f"
done

From the GUI, BBEdit (the free version is what replaced TextWrangler) is one of the text editors that can create a plain-text file, and which is the format you will need here when creating this file. The command-line editor nano (pico) will also work, among other options.

Nothing quite like walking down a primrose path of wrongness about touch -r. For some reason, I mentally blotted out SetFile.

For the first time, Apple is including a watered down Python 3 distribution in either Xcode 11, or the Command Line Tools for Xcode 11. If one has not installed Xcode 11, or any third-party Python 3 distribution, then one can simply type on the command line in Catalina 10.15.0/1:

python3

and Catalina will prompt if you want to install the Command Line Tools for Xcode 11. When you do, you have spared 8GB of storage from the full Xcode 11 installation and now have /usr/bin/SetFile installed.

The following two command line invocations would apply the modification date and the birth (creation) date of the original file to the target file in the quoted format that SetFile expects:

SetFile -m "$(stat -t '%m/%d/%Y %T' -f '%Sm' srcfilepath)" destfilepath
SetFile -d "$(stat -t '%m/%d/%Y %T' -f '%SB' srcfilepath)" destfilepath

Try this:

touch -r path/to/your/.dv file /path/to/new/mp4

This will apply the creation and modification dates from the old .dv video to the new .mp4.

If you’re willing to install Xcode to get SetFile, then: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/99599