Find date/time when item added item in folder?

Question

Hey guys,
I was wondering if there was any Automator Action out there that allows you filter finder items by date "added" to a folder.
Please don't confuse with the date of the actual item. I am talking about if there is anyway to be able to detect and find when an item was added into a folder.
Thanks. I hope there is something out there. If not then I hope that there is some sort of applescript that can do this. 
Please help.
Phil

Answer 1

I'm not aware of an Automator action, but starting in OS X 10.7 Lion a Spotlight metadata attribute named kMDItemDateAdded was added that contains the ISO date/time an item was added.  If the item has been moved recently enough to have the attribute (and assuming that Spotlight is indexing the containing folder), there are a couple of utilities you could use.
The mdfind shell utility won't be quite like filtering, but by limiting the find search to a particular folder and using the appropriate query, you can get a list of items - for example, the following will list items added to the Downloads folder in the last week:
do shell script "mdfind -onlyin ~/Downloads 'kMDItemDateAdded >= $time.today(-7)' "
The mdls shell utility can be used if you are just wanting to get the value of a particular metadata attribute from an item, for example:
set theFile to quoted form of POSIX path of (choose file)
do shell script "mdls -name kMDItemDateAdded -raw " & theFile