Date Format Key

  • YYYY — The year (the first two digits/century can be omitted).
  • MM — The month of the year, from 1 to 12.
  • DD — The day of the month, from 1 to 31.
  • hh — The hour of the day, from 0 to 23.
  • mm — The minute of the hour, from 0 to 59.

Go to answer for Mac OS High Sierra and newer

Go to answer for Mac OS El Capitan and older

How to change the “date modified” attribute of a file in Mac OS High Sierra and newer?

Unfortunately, new versions of Mac OS have different version of touch command, try these steps:

  1. Open up the Terminal application (Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) or if you prefer use iTerm.
  2. Type this into Terminal (without hitting enter/return) replacing YYYYMMDDhhmm with the desired date information:
touch -m -t YYYYMMDDhhmm
  1. Open a Finder window and locate the file you wish to modify and drag and drop it into the Terminal window. Here’s an example of what should be typed into the Terminal at this point:
touch -m -t 200801120000 /Volumes/Mac\ HD/Pictures/somefile.jpg

200801120000 in the example above represent “January 12, 2008 12:00 AM” or my 21st birthday. Make sure to change 200801120000 to the date you want and to replace /Volumes/Mac\ HD/Pictures/somefile.jpg with the proper path to the file you wish to alter the date for.

  1. If all is in order press the return key.

How to change the “date modified” attribute recursively?

find ./folder/ -type f -exec touch -m -t 200801120000 {} \;

How to change creation date too?

Just remove m argument:

touch -t 200801120000

Alternatively, you can install xcode command line tools, and follow all steps:

xcode-select --install

Then you can use it’s command to change creation date, date syntax is MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS (where HH is hours in 24h format):

setfile -d "02/28/2016 13:21:59" FILENAME.PNG

How to change the “date modified” attribute of a file in Mac OS El Capitan and older?

  1. Open up the Terminal application (Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) or if you prefer use iTerm.
  2. Type this into Terminal (without hitting enter/return) replacing YYYYMMDDhhmm with the desired date information:
touch -mtYYYYMMDDhhmm
  1. Open a Finder window and locate the file you wish to modify and drag and drop it into the Terminal window. Here’s an example of what should be typed into the Terminal at this point:
touch -mt200801120000 /Volumes/Mac\ HD/Pictures/somefile.jpg

200801120000 in the example above represent “January 12, 2008 12:00 AM” or my 21st birthday. Make sure to change 200801120000 to the date you want and to replace /Volumes/Mac\ HD/Pictures/somefile.jpg with the proper path to the file you wish to alter the date for.

  1. If all is in order press the return key.

How to change the “date modified” attribute recursively?

find ./folder/ -type f -exec touch -mt200801120000 {} \;

How to change creation date too?

Just remove m argument:

touch -t200801120000

What’s about Linux?

It’s the same but with additional space:

touch -mt YYYYMMDDhhmm

and recursive one:

find ./folder/ -type f -exec touch -mt 07011200 {} \;