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touch(1) can only change modification and access times, but has no options for creation time. This does not work, at least not on Lion.

So how do I change the creation time, also referred to as birthtime in fstat(2)? There's no corresponding call in utimes(2) and there doesn't seem to be any command line tool for this.

I know I can copy the file to a new file, which then gets the current time as birthtime (and then delete the original), but surely there must be a better way?

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touch -t yyyymmddhhmm $file does seem to change the creation date, but only if it's before the original creation date. – Lauri Ranta Apr 20 '12 at 5:22
Good point, @Lri - that actually makes sense, since that updates the mtime and atime and a file couldn't be accessed or modified before it was created. But it doesn't let me set a newer creation time. – Ingmar Hupp Apr 20 '12 at 13:32
Are you referring to changing it via the command line, or just in general, not necessarily with the CLI? – daviesgeek Jun 29 '12 at 21:36
Frankly I would hope you can't change it, as surely it would defeat the entire point of the field?! Also I suspect some of hte problem is that birthtime/creation time isn't a standard filesystem feature; hfs added it in their extended attributes, I think - so unless utilities have been updated to recognise that, they won't be able to do much with it. – Caesium Aug 2 '12 at 13:59
possible duplicate of How do I set the creation time of a file? – patrix♦ Aug 7 '12 at 20:11

2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

SetFile can also be used to set the creation date before the modification date or in the future.

-d date    Sets the creation date, where date is a string of the
           form: "mm/dd/[yy]yy [hh:mm:[:ss] [AM | PM]]" Notes:
           Enclose the string in quotation marks if it contains spa-
           ces. The date must be in the Unix epoch, that is, between
           1/1/1970 and 1/18/2038. If the year is provided as a two-
           digit year, it is assumed to be in the 21st century and
           must be from 00 (2000) through 38 (2038).

This would set the creation date to the modification date:

SetFile -d "$(GetFileInfo -m test.txt)" test.txt

SetFile and GetFileInfo are part of the command line tools package, which can be downloaded from developer.apple.com/downloads or from Xcode's preferences after installing it from the App Store.

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up vote -1 down vote

Try:

cat filename > newfile
mv filename ~/.Trash/
mv newfile filename

That should work.

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You'll still need to delete the original. Ingmar had already covered this. – Hippo Apr 20 '12 at 1:53
Whoops, should've read better. But no, there is not a better way... – Sean Freitag Apr 20 '12 at 3:22

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