In Lion, folders can now be sorted by “Date Added,” in addition to modification and creation dates. Unfortunately, this isn’t accessible through file properties, but only through Spotlight metadata. I came up with a little sub-routine to access this datum, and thought I’d share it with the community. It uses a bit of meta-scripting in order to coerce a date, so if anyone knows a way around this, please chime in!
on getDateAdded(theFile)
set aFilePath to POSIX path of theFile
do shell script "mdls -name kMDItemDateAdded -raw " & (quoted form of aFilePath)
do shell script "ruby -e \"require 'date'\" -e \"puts DateTime.parse('" & result & "').strftime('%m-%d-%Y')\""
run script ("get date \"" & result & "\"")
return result
end getDateAdded
This is great – I’m going to move it from here to Code Exchange after it’s been here for long enough to gather comments.
Without the ruby, it’s this:
set DA to do shell script "mdls -name kMDItemDateAdded -raw " & quoted form of POSIX path of (choose file)
set delim to "/"
tell DA to set dateAdded to word 3 & delim & word 2 & delim & word 1
At this time, only the ruby one is using worldWide.
The two other return the date in US format : mm/dd/yy hh:mm:ss
Would be fine to return the ISO format :
yyyy-mm-ddThh.mm.ss
I edited the second script to return the local format :
set DA to do shell script "mdls -name kMDItemDateAdded -raw " & quoted form of POSIX path of (choose file)
set dateAdded to current date
set day of dateAdded to 1
set year of dateAdded to word 1 of DA
set month of dateAdded to word 2 of DA
set day of dateAdded to word 3 of DA
set hours of dateAdded to word 4 of DA
set minutes of dateAdded to word 5 of DA
set seconds of dateAdded to word 6 of DA
dateAdded
On my Lion machine the time of day is always wrong (compared to the Finder). The Finder pays attention to your local time zone, while mdls lists the time as GMT. In my case, that’s a “4 hour difference. mdls says 19:43 for a file I just saved, and the Finder (on a 12-hour clock) says 3:43, e.g., 15:43 in 24-hour clock time. If a time is near midnight, that results in a wrong date.
The initial shell script returns the correct date time.
It’s the Ruby code which is wrong.
It extract the date in the US format → 11-29-2011 so, when the last instruction : get date. apply, on a non English system it return a foolish value.
That’s hard to do, because you need the offset at the time and date in question, not now. Anyway, here’s an ASObjC solution that should work anywhere and handles the time zone difference:
script dateStringToDate
-- get passed string as NSString
set dateString to current application's NSApp's convertedValue()
-- turn it back into the NSDate it was stored as
set theNSDate to current application's NSDate's dateWithString_(dateString)
-- convert it to an AS date using ObjectWithFords method ford_
set theFord to current application's ObjectWithFords's alloc()'s init()
set theASDate to theFord's ford_(theNSDate)
end script
set thePath to quoted form of "/Users/shane/Downloads/CSVData-9.csv"
set dateString to do shell script "mdls -name kMDItemDateAdded -raw " & (thePath)
tell application "ASObjC Runner"
set theDate to (run the script {dateStringToDate} converting dateString with result returned)
end tell
Sorry, I should have made that clear. It’s also longer than it needs to be; ASObjC Runner does the conversion from NSDate to AS date automatically. So the script part only needs to be:
script dateStringToDate
-- get passed string as NSString
set dateString to current application's NSApp's convertedValue()
-- turn it back into the NSDate it was stored as; it will be converted to an AS date on return
set theNSDate to current application's NSDate's dateWithString_(dateString)
end script
The script posted on 2012-02-27 05:11:32 am refuse to compile under 10.8.5 with ASObjC Runner version 1.9.13
It stop highlighting the word returned in the instruction :
set theDate to (run the script {dateStringToDate} converting dateString with result returned)
KOENIG Yvan (VALLAURIS, France) samedi 14 septembre 2013 09:21:31
