mac geekery

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