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How do I set the creation time of a file?

How can you create a files on a Mac that have a specific creation date (different from the current one)?

What I have found so far, touch can only alter the modified at time...

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How to change the creation date/time of a file in Lion? only mentions touch -t as well. – Lauri Ranta Jul 16 '12 at 16:48
@Lri, thank you: I didn't come across it in my searches. – Marius Butuc Jul 16 '12 at 18:26

marked as duplicate by patrix♦, Lauri Ranta, jmlumpkin, bmike♦ Aug 14 '12 at 18:32

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I believe you can do it with touch.

touch -t YYYYMMDDhhmm /filehere
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touch -t normally only changes the modification date. The creation date is only changed if the new modification date would be before it. – Lauri Ranta Jul 16 '12 at 16:52
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On 10.7, touch -t appears to work on my test system, even if the mod date is after. I used touch -mt to change the mod time and it works fine. – Richard Belisle Jul 16 '12 at 17:21
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I meant that touch file.txt; touch -t 199901010000 file.txt would change the creation date, but touch file2.txt; touch -t 209901010000 file2.txt wouldn't. – Lauri Ranta Jul 16 '12 at 18:05
@RichardBelisle thank you: it works! – Marius Butuc Jul 16 '12 at 18:26
up vote 4 down vote

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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Awesome, thanks for finding this! – patrix♦ Aug 7 '12 at 20:10

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