How to give all files the same modification time

These are instructions for a friend of mine who’s not super-techy. He’s on a Mac, & periodically he needs to make sure all the files in a directory have the same date & time. The command line to the rescue¹!

1. Open Terminal by using Alfred or Spotlight (search for Terminal & when it’s found, make sure it’s selected & press Enter).

2. In Terminal, type cd followed by a space, but do not press Enter.

3. In Finder, find the folder that contains the files you want to change. Select that folder & drag it into Terminal. When you let go, you should now see the path to your folder after the cd, so that it looks like this: cd /Users/scott/Movies/My\ Project.

4. Press Enter in Terminal.

5. If you want to change the modification time of all the files, enter the following in Terminal: touch * (that’s an asterisk). Press Enter. Note that this will change every file in the folder. If you only want to change the mp4 files, you’d type touch *.mp4; to change the mov files, you’d type touch *mov, and so on.

6. To verify that all files now have the same date, type ls -l in Terminal & press Enter. You’ll see a bunch of info, but you should be able to tell that the dates of all the files are now the same.

7. Close Terminal.