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indefensible:

Yes, I should know this. But please if you can help, I’d appreciate it.

This is a listing of files stored in various job folders. I’ve used the finder to create me a nice big list of files (about 4,000 of them, representing 8,000 pages of design layout over the past 6 years), and now I’d like to send that list of filenames and creation dates to a text file. Paths would even be better.

I’m willing to buy an app to do this if required. Feel free to mock me for my unwillingness to use the terminal. I’ve been busy – that 8,000 pages is only one of our clients.

Thanks in advance, and yes, again I apologise for not being able to use terminal properly.

1. Open TextEdit.

2. Open a TextEdit window

3. Change the window from RTF to plain text (cmd+shift+t or Format > Make Plain Text)

4. Select all the files in your Finder/Spotlight window

5. Drag them to the TextEdit window you created.

6. That will give you filenames with full paths.

7. Save the file as ~/Desktop/foobar.txt (change as you see fit, but that’s what I’m using as an example)

8. Open Terminal and copy/paste this line as one line line:

   (cat ~/Desktop/foobar.txt|while read line;do;ls -l “$line” ;done)|open -f

that will give you a new file with the sizes and LAST MODIFIED dates.

You wanted creation dates, didn’t you.

OK, so replace step 8 with this:

(cat ~/Desktop/foobar.txt|\
while read line
do
CREATED=`mdls "$line" |  awk -F"=" '/kMDItemFSCreationDate/{print $2}'`
echo "$CREATED\t$line"
done) | open -f

Note: there are 6 lines. If you copy/paste it from Tumblr it should come out OK. The first word on each line should be: (cat, while, do, CREATED, echo, done)

That should do it.

ps - A NOTE TO THE NERDS: first person to say “useless use of cat” gets a cat thrown at them. Yes, I know. This isn’t 1983, we can spare it.