Hello,

I wrote this posting twice, but it was rejected by the listserv, because it had too many lines. I deleted many empty lines to make it shorter.

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Hello Christopher, Hello All,

Thank you for your comments.

Following your suggestion, I used Perl to write three laborious scripts, to achieve what I needed to do. First, this one, to get the file path of all the folder structure, and their size and modified date, and I ran this script for two folders that I had to compare:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use utf8;
use File::Find;

@ARGV = ("/Users/me/Documents/myFolder/");
my $startfolder = shift;
my @files;
find( \&macfind, $startfolder );

my $res = "";
for (@files) {
	if (-d $_) {
		$_ .= "/";
	}
	my $mod_date = `/usr/bin/GetFileInfo -m "$_"`;
	chomp $mod_date;
	my $sz = -s $_;
	$res .= $_ . "\t" . $mod_date . "\t" . $sz . "\n";
}

print $res;

sub macfind {
	my $file = $File::Find::name;
	push( @files, $file ) unless $file =~ /\/\.[^\/]*$/;
}

Second, I used the following script to make a list of files for which I had to change the modified date:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use utf8;

my $source_list = "/Users/me/Desktop/sourcefile_list.txt";

my %source_list;

open (IN, "<:utf8", $source_list) || die "Couldn't open file $source_list: $!";
while (<IN>) {
	chomp;
	s/^\/Volumes\/Extra_1\///;
	my ($filepath, $rest) = /^([^\t]+)\t(.+)/;
	$source_list{$filepath} = $rest;
}
close (IN);

my $dest_list = "/Users/me/Desktop/destfile_list.txt";

my %dest_list;

open (IN, "<:utf8", $dest_list)  || die "Couldn't open file $dest_list: $!";
while (<IN>) {
	chomp;
	s/^\/Users\/me\/Documents\///;
	my ($filepath, $rest) = /^([^\t]+)\t(.+)/;
	$dest_list{$filepath} = $rest;
}
close (IN);

my $res;
foreach my $i (keys %source_list) {
	if (exists $dest_list{$i}) {
		my ($source_mtime, $source_sz) = split (/\t/, $source_list{$i});
		my ($dest_mtime, $dest_sz) = split (/\t/, $dest_list{$i});
		if ($source_sz == $dest_sz && $source_mtime ne $dest_mtime) {
			$res .= "/Users/me/Documents/" . $i . "\t" . $source_mtime . "\n";
		}
		if ($i =~ /\/$/ && $source_sz ne $dest_sz && $source_mtime ne $dest_mtime) {
			$res .= "/Users/me/Documents/" . $i . "\t" . $source_mtime . "\n";
		}
	}
}

binmode (STDOUT, ":utf8");
print $res;

Finally, I wrote the third script with which I corrected the modified time of the list created:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

@ARGV = ("/Users/me/Desktop/folder_mod_date_to_change_list.txt");

my $list_file = shift;

open (IN, "<:utf8", $list_file) || die "Couldn't open the list file $list_file: $!";
my @list_lines = <IN>;
close ($list_file);

my $error_log;
my $res_log;
for (@list_lines) {
	chomp;
	my ($file_path, $mod_date) = split ("\t", $_);
	if (! -e $file_path) {
		$error_log .= "Error: the file doesn't exist: $file_path!\n";
	}
	else {
		my $result = `/usr/bin/SetFile -m "$mod_date" "$file_path"`;
		if (! $result) {
			$res_log .= "Could correct the modified date of the file $file_path to $mod_date.\n";
		}
		else {
			$error_log .= "Error: the modified time could not set to the file $file_path: Error number: $result\n";
		}
	}
}

binmode (STDOUT, ":utf8");
if ($error_log) {
	print "Errors:\n";
	print $error_log, "\n";
}

if ($res_log) {
	print "Result:\n", $res_log;
}

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I spent long time to do this, but finally, I am rather satisfied with the result.

I used "GetFileInfo" and "SetFile" -- which seem very slow, but they are useful because are rather easy to understand and to use.

Thank you again for your help.
Best regard,

Nobumi Iyanaga
Tokyo,
Japan