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I believe there's some similar posts that if I was better at this I could figure out the answer to my own question (This one and this one).

I have a Mac and am using the setfile command from the terminal which works great on an individual file.

setfile -d "08/02/2001 00:00:00" X-09-04.m4v

However, I have hundreds of videos to do this with. I have a file changedate.csv file with all the dates and associated file names in two separate columns (screenshot). The csv is formatted like this:

datenew,id
12/19/1998 12:00:00 AM,X-01/X-01-01.m4v
12/31/1998 12:00:00 AM,X-01/X-01-02.m4v
12/31/1998 12:00:00 AM,X-01/X-01-03.m4v

I then created changedate.sh script that looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
cat changedate.csv | while IFS=, read datenew id;
do
    echo 'setfile -d "$datenew" $id'
done

The command setfile requires the date string needs to be wrapped in quotes. This is what messes me up, because when I run sh changedate.sh script from the terminal, it prints out like this:

setfile -d "$datenew" $id
setfile -d "$datenew" $id
setfile -d "$datenew" $id
....

If I remove the quotes around the variable it correctly reads the csv and the output looks like this:

setfile -d 12/19/1998 00:00:00  X-01/X-01-01.m4v
setfile -d 12/31/1998 00:00:00  X-01/X-01-02.m4v
setfile -d 12/31/1998 00:00:00  X-01/X-01-03.m4v
...

This is almost right, but it doesn't work because the date string isn't wrapped in quotes which is required. The final output should look like this:

setfile -d "12/19/1998 00:00:00"  X-01/X-01-01.m4v
setfile -d "12/31/1998 00:00:00"  X-01/X-01-02.m4v
setfile -d "12/31/1998 00:00:00"  X-01/X-01-03.m4v
...

I think I need to use backslashes to get the variable to print with the quotes, but I can't quite figure it out. Thanks for any help!

Bryan Willis
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  • Why are you echoing the `setfile` command instead of just executing it? – Barmar Dec 24 '19 at 20:30
  • `setfile` itself does not need (or see) the quotes; those are just to protect the space between the date and the time from word-splitting. If you plan on actually running the command, `setfile -d "$datenew" "$id"` is all you need. – chepner Dec 24 '19 at 20:41

1 Answers1

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Variables are only expanded inside double quotes, not single quotes. So you need to put double quotes around the argument to echo.

echo "setfile -d '$datenew' '$id'"
Barmar
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