How to change the date on a large number of files?

Question

My computer reset itself to 2001 and messed up my iPhone as well.

I have reset the date but now all the files on the HDD are dated 2001.

How do I change this?

Answer 1

Something isn't quite right here. Computers run the current date all the time, and all the files on the HDD don't simply get updated to the current time. You could use the find command to list all files with dates older than X and then execute touch -r to set the times in relation to another file if that's easier than specifying a time directly via the touch command.

I don't know what process is changing the dates, but something like this should work...

find /Volumes/whatever -type f -mtime whenever -print0 | xargs -0 touch -r /path/to/ref.file

Use care since on macs, files with spaces or other characters that the unix shell interprets as ending one file. The -print0 and xargs -0 agree to use the null character as the delimiter to avoid creating all sorts of a mess of your system. Do have a good backup if you are not an expert at using touch and the command line.