mac geekery

Answer

No, I don’t recall it, and several Google searches came up dry. However, this is an easy enough task to do with the find command.

Read the manpage for a list of all the little flags you can pass to it (there are a ton) and you’ll be able to draft up some criteria for a group of files you want to mark. Once you have that, simply call find with those criteria and then append an exec argument to the command like so:

find /Users/codepoet/Documents/ -name '*purple*' \
-exec osascript -e "tell application \"Finder\" to set the label \
index of POSIX file \"$PWD/{}\" to 5" \;

Make as many of these as you want, put them in a shell script and then use cron or launchd to run the script now and again and you’re set. Note that you might want some logic to unset a label if the criteria are no longer met, such as making a pass that sets every file to 0 before running the other scans.

It works better without the line breaks, of course.