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Changing File Labels Outside The Finder

By JC » Posted on September 14, 2007 - 3:50pm
rexroof asks:

Question

How do a figure out if a file has a color label on it (and what it is) in a perl script? Any applescript or shell program to do it would be awesome.

Answer

I’m not really sure if there’s a perly way to do this. I don’t see anything in File::Spec::Mac or Mac::Files that appears to handle reading or changing labels. It can be done with AppleScript, though.

Try this little snippet. As is, it only works with files, not folders, but a little digging in the Finder’s dictionary should make it obvious how to use this with other filetypes.



tell application “Finder”
  — get the currently selected label
  set the_label to the label index of POSIX file “/path/to/file”


  — set the label
  set label index of POSIX file “/path/to/file” to 0   — or to 1, or to 2, etc
end tell
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JC is a former Mac Genius and Mac-centric IT worker with a background in print advertising. He earned a reputation as a miracle worker when he saved the day at a new business pitch with the arcane knowledge that Apple’s ADB cables were nothing more than poorly shielded S-Video cables.

JC runs the Heroic Efforts Data Recovery Service and writes Ungenius, a tawdry tale of the life and times of a former Mac Genius.

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Re: Changing File Labels Outside The Finder
mehemiah on September 14, 2007 - 4:25pm

perhaps when appscript is ported to perl, this will half to do.

Re: Changing File Labels Outside The Finder
rexroof on September 16, 2007 - 3:35pm

why would appscript need to be ported to perl if Mac::Glue already exists?

Re: Changing File Labels Outside The Finder
Steve Mills (not verified) on December 4, 2007 - 9:10pm

If perl can run Unix commands, you can get the kMDItemFSLabel attribute with mdls. Note that the Spotlight index is different than the AppleScript index:

           Spotlight       AS
none:      0                0
red:       6                2
orange:    7                1
yellow:    5                3
green:     2                6
blue:      4                4
purple:    3                5
grey:      1                7
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