Fixing a broken file creation date on macOSEdit

Created , updated

Just say you have a file that has a busted creation date on it like January 1st, 1970 (ie. the beginning of the Unix epoch).

There are a bunch of old posts out there such as this one that claim that touch -t YYYYMMDDhhmm.SS $FILENAME should work, however I found that they didn’t work on macOS High Sierra on a machine using an APFS filesystem.

This Stack Overflow post says that touch won’t fix creation dates, but that wasn’t the problem I was seeing (I was seeing it basically ignore the argument and create files called -t and YYYYMMDDhhmm). Nevertheless, the post does contain the answer, which is to use SetFile which comes with the Xcode tools.

SetFile -d '03/10/2018 10:00:00 AM' $FILENAME