Rename a file with its creation date

Introduction

rename a file to add its creation date and (optionally) time stamp to the beginning of the file name. uses mdls to get the content creation date and time.

YYYMMDDTHHMMSS filename

Syntax

rename-to-creation.pl [--time] [--git] [--email] [-x] files

--email the file is an email; look for the "Date: " email header and convert its timezone, and use the email date if it's before the creation date. This is handy for emails you've dragged out of Mail.app to the finder; their creation time will be the time of the drag.

--git prepend the mv command with git

--time if specified, will also add 'Ttimestamp' to the filename.

-x or --x this flag causes the actual mv command to run; without this, rename-to-creation.pl just prints out what it would do but doesn't do anything.

Examples

remember, it won't actually do the move until you add the --x flag. and you can use any shell globbing commands, such as *.txt or insurance*.pdf.

Note: this doesn't care if it's a file or a folder.

no flags

rename-to-creation.pl old.jpg

will look for a file name "old.jpg", use mdls to get its kMDItemContentCreationDate, and than rename the file. let's assume the file was created 2023-10-08 at 4:17:11pm (localtime). you'd see:

old.jpg
mv "old.jpg" "20231008 old.jpg"

add timestamp

with the same file, if you ran rename-to-creation.pl --time old.jpg you'd see

old.jpg
mv "old.jpg" "20231008T161711 old.jpg"

Weird filenames

if you have filenames that start with a dash (-), add -- first; this tells the commandline parser to stop looking for options and flags.

rename-to-creation.pl --time --email -- --\ file\ starting\ with\ dash.eml

for really difficult names, try with find and xargs (only do this in a folder with no subfolders). I settled on this while trying to rename a folder with 8,000 old emails in it.

find . -type f -print0 |xargs -0 rename-to-creation.pl --email --time --