How to Change Modified Dates in a Mac OS X

You can adjust the modification date of any file or folder on your Mac's hard drive.

In the Mac OS X operating system, the Finder application acts as a file browser, and tracks different information and properties about the files and folders on your hard drive. For example, each time you make a change to an item, the Finder updates the item's modification date. With the Terminal application, you can manually change a file's modification date to the day of your choice.

Things You'll Need

• Mac running OS X 10.5 or later

Instructions

1. Open a new Finder window by clicking on the dock icon.

2. Highlight "Applications" from the "Places" list on the left side of the window.

3. Open the "Utilities" folder and double-click on "Terminal."

4. Type "touch -mt YYYYMMDDhhmm" into the blank Terminal window, replacing "YYYYMMDDhhmm" with the four-digit year, two-digit month, two-digit day, two-digit hour and two-digit minute that you want to use.

5. Go back to the Finder window and highlight the file for which you want to change the modification date.

6. Click on the file's icon, drag it on top of the Terminal window and then release the mouse button. The Terminal application will automatically add the file's path to the end of the modification date command.

7. Press the "Return" key to run the command and change the file's modification date.

References

• Tangential Musings; How to change a file's last modified and creation dates on Mac OS X; Danilo Stern-Sapad