Folder modification dates spontaneously changing

I discovered that a limited batch of folders on several different hard drives had all taken on the same modification date, which was several days ago. It is truly maddening because I keep the contents of may enclosing folders sorted by modification date for critical reasons, and now these spontaneously changed folders are far out of order.
To make it more maddening, I'm using a program designed to allow changing of the modification dates, which has been working fine on most of them, to change the dates to the same as the latest date of a folder's enclosed contents, but one of them keeps changing it's modification date to right now if I merely twirl down its "carrot" or viewing arrow in list view!
I've been doing this a long time and have never encountered anything quite as mysterious or frustrating. Does anybody have any idea what could have caused this?
LATE NOTE: I had downloaded and run the Onyx program to fix an issue that OpenPGP had with contextual menus not showing up. Their page recommended running the Automation pane of Onyx as the solution. I just found out that I ran that on the same date as the folder modification date changes. Could it be the culprit, and if so, how and why?

Thanks, Eric. I still don't understand why, though, some of those folders became something I'd never seen before: folders that would change their modification date even if the "carrot" were twirled down. It's sure bizarre behavior. And in the middle of trying to solve that, suddenly my two external hard drives became inexplicably read-only. Even though the "Info" window showed that I had read/write access, above the permissions section it said the disk was read only, and even when unlocking the permissions lock, it all was greyed out.
I found a strange suggestion in this discussion group to use DiskUtility to do nothing but verify those drives. I did—and suddenly they were all correct in the permissions department. I swear. I've never seen anything remotely like any of this.
I'm ready to order a custom tinfoil hat for my Mac.

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Folder Modification Dates -- possible to override this behavior?

Opening a previously unopened folder causes its modification date to change -- a system behavior that aggravates me to no end. Is there a way of overriding or supressing this behavior with a Unix command?
Also, is there any way to force a folder's modification date to revert to its creation date?
-=iSchwartz=-

Hi,
I don't know if it's possible to change that behaviour, but there are ways to (batch) change the modification date to the same as the creation date and vice versa. I used this with scans of old pictures to regain correct sorting in iPhoto because they had no EXIF date.
You can use Miana to set the desired dates or Twotade to equal the 2 dates Here are the links:
http://www.limit-point.com/Utilities.html#Miana
http://www.limit-point.com/Utilities.html#Twotade
Hope this helps a little!
Björn

DNG file modification date not changed by writing metadata?

I use LR 2.7 on Windows XP.   To my surprise, I just noticed that writing metadata updates (e.g., new keywords) from LR to the DNG files does NOT appear to update the file modification date, which suggests obvious issues for backup strategies (yes, I understand that a changed modification date introduces other backup issues).   I have verfifed that the metatdata does indeed change in the DNG files, so I am mystified.   Can someone shed some light on this?   Thanks.
js
www.johnshorephoto.com

Yes, I explicitely invoke "save metadata to file".   Furthemore, I have checked the behavior by (a) modifying DNGs in LR; (b) saving the metatdata to the DNG; (c) creating a new LR catalog and importing the revised DNGs.    The metadata changes do show up in the re-imported DNGs (and the metadata field "Metadata Date" correctly shows the recent change). Morevover, the file sizes do change (wth the metadata changes) even though the modification dates shown in windows explorer do not change.
However, I just redid the experiment to double check, and discovered an important clue - the mysterious behavior occurs when the DNG files are on a NAS device (in particular a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo.   To summarize:
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What's more, I see the same behavior when accessing the DNGs via Adobe Bridge (CS5) - i.e., if I change the metadata, I'm asked if I want to apply the metadata changes to the DNG, and I say yes (and confirm by looking via Bridge at a copy of the changed file).   On a local disk, the file modificaiton dates change (as do the modification date displayed in Bridge), but if the files are on the NAS, the modification dates do not.
Any additional thoughts?
js

Why did finder change some modification dates when making a copy?

I just copied a very large number of files using Finder and I discovered that some modification dates were changed. For me this wasn't a problem, but it's strange and I don't understand why it happened. I wonder if anyone else has seen a similar behavior. Here are the details:
I have a Mac Pro running under OSX 10.7.4 with 15 GB of RAM and 7 hard disks. The disks details are as follows:
Internal 1 is 500 GB and came with the computer. It is my boot drive and has a variety of material. It's about 75% full.
Internal 2 is 1 TB. It has OSX 10.6.8 on it for use as a repair disk if I need to run TechTools against my main drive or if I need to run SpringCleaning. It is about 85% full and contains mainly videos of one type or another.
Internal 3 is 2 TB. It is 98% full and contains mostly .jpg files. This drive has a single root folder with 3-4 levels of subfolders. Some subfolders have as many as 5000 folders in them. The bottom level folders each have anywhere from 20 to 300 files.
Internal 4 is 3 TB. It was purchased last week because drives 2 and 3 are getting full. My intent is to copy drive 3 to 4, then copy the data from 2 to 3. I'll probably retire 2 since my SMART checks are showing problems.
External 1 is 3 TB and is used only for Time Machine to backup internal 1.
External 2 is 4 TB and is used to backup Internal 2 and 3 using ChronoSync. I'll be changing this to 3 and 4 soon.
4 days ago I installed drive 4 and used Finder to copy the root folder from drive 3 to 4. That took about a day. I then ran ChronoSync in Trial Sync mode to see if everything was OK. (Perhaps I shold have used ChronSync to make the transfer.) I discovered that about 8,000 files had discrepancies. I wrote a simple AppleScript to identify any meta data differences between the files on the two drives. It's been running for about 12 hours and I suspect it will take more than a day to finish. So far all that script has found are modification date differences. I've examined about a dozen of the files and they look OK.
Anyone seen anything like this? Any ideas what happened? I have three user accounts on this Mac Pro. The copy was made in one account with nothing else running, but I was doing a variety of work in another account. The third account was not active.
I just did a better search of this forum and discovered a similar case from 2010.

I just found the following in another thread:
Actually yes. In my case it was my antivirus McAfee doing it. If I copied the files after disabling it, the file dates were preserved.
BTW if only few files are copied, this problem does not arise.
YMMV.
--neeraj00
Since I have McAfee installed on my Mac Pro I suspect that was the cause.

Opening Nested folders changes the modification date of the parent folder

This has been bugging me for some time and is very odd...
If I open a folder that is nested inside another folder it changes the modification date of the parent folder to today's date and time, even though I have not made any changes to the folders contents, or even viewed any of the contents.
I have posted this question on other forums and no one has been able to reproduce this on their systems.
I have multiple macs, using a combination of 10.4 and 10.5, connected via an AEBS and this only seems to occur when I am connected to my network.
All machines have been setup using a migration from a previous machine going way back to my original OSX installation and various iterations of Powerbooks, iBooks, iMacs, Minis, MacBooks etc...
Can anyone throw any light as to what is causing this?
Many thanks,

Hi Ben,
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I'm not sure about this, but I think that when it happens that network time and date is automatically being set.
Dimaxum

What is changing the modification date of every folder?

Almost every folder and subfolder on my hard drive has the same modification date and time but they were not actually modified. The modification dates on individual files within are still unique. I looked around in the logs for some event at the date and time but couldn't find anything. What could cause this?

Hi,
take a look at LogMiner
regards
vlado

Any idea why Mavericks is changing modification dates on my folders?

My download folder is on an external HD and for the past week or so, I noticed that Mavericks has been changing the modification dates of some folders (only folders, not files) so that older folders will come up on top when sorted by dates. It just happened a minute ago, I downloaded a file and a few second after, I heard the ticking sound of data being written on the HD. I opened the download folder and sure enough, there was five folders that were on top of the file I had downloaded. I never got this with any previous versions of OSX. This is really annoying since I usually use the modification date view to find files that I've recently dowloaded.

Same here - I've just reported that to Apple at https://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html
It's fair to call it a bug I think. Opening a folder changes the modification dates of some, but not all, the folders enclosed.
Plays havoc with organising time series (backups, things one has just worked on, etc.).
There are two other discussions on this subject, but neither has received any attention, so I've responded to all three.

What would change a file modification date into the future?

Of late, I've been noticing that [apparantly random] files that have NOT be accessed are showing a modification date somewhere in the future.
I couldn't figure out why zip was adding files I hadn't touched to an archive of files changed since a certain date. Looked in Finder, and they have dates from 1 to 20 some years into the future, in the modification column, and sometimes, no creation date.
Also, files deep in the contents of some apps are losing me as an owner, leading zip to tell me "access denied".
Any thoughts as to what's going on? Other than the paranoid; there's some evil virus, whatever, running amok.

Did you check the code in your template.dwt file for errors?
http://validator.w3.org/
Did you save over or rename your original Template.dwt file?
Did you move your Template.dwt file from it's Templates folder?
Nancy O.

Un-modified folders with changed modification dates

I have several folders that I have not touched for months, and suddenly, they all have the same modification date & time. The files inside the folders have the correct dates on them (some are two years old).
This seems to be happening with only one folder, which itself is in the Documents folder. There is an alias to it on the sidebar. Inside that folder, just today, 53 folders all changed their modification dates with out me even looking at them!
This is highly annoying, as it is a folder in which I store jobs that I have completed. Any solutions?

This was the result of a syncing application, not Mac OS. Removed application, problem solved.

HELP: modification date/time of Indesig changes afther copy files to server

When i copy a folder witch some Indesign documents from my iMac (10.6.1) to our Apple xServe (10.6.1) its happens often that the Indesign documents on the server ands up with a changed modification date/time. It's changes the date/time in the date/tim when the copy to the server found place! We use 18 iMac's and encountered this problem daily on several iMac's
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I am also experiencing this problem. I have done further testing and found that only one of my shared volumes (all on the same RAID) is having this issue, and further - that operations with package (collect for output) are also affected. If anyone has any info, it would be welcome!

Changing creation or modification date with Automator

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I have created an Automator action that allows the user to control-click a folder with audio files in it and have Automator manually change the file name, then import the files into iTunes. My hope was that this would change each files modification date so that, at a later time, another Automator action could search the network drive for newly added media via the modification date. My problem is that simply changing the name does not change the modification date. Even creating an archive and unzipping it before importing does not change the date.
What action can I do with Automator that will change the modification date on those files so that I can search for them later? I know I can add the date to the file name but I don't want a user to have to guess which dates files were added (i.e. I'd have to tell Automator "look for this specific date in the file name' which is obviously unhelpful if I don't know the specific date).
Long story short, how can I change either dates with Automator?

Create a column with the following.
TIMESTAMPDIFF( SQL_TSI_day, Opportunity."Created Date" , CURRENT_TIMESTAMP )
add a filter on this column, for example, <=90.
the SQL_TSI_month does not return accurate number of months.
Cheers!
Shilei

Project Server 2010 - Modification date and name of the person who made the last change in the project

Hello everybody
I'm with a doubt.
I got in the business
environment Project Server 2010 and
would like to get the publication date,modification
date and name
of the person who made
the last change in
the project. It is possible
to doby the native
resources or is
there any query in
SQL Server to perform a
query of this information.
Thank you.
Obrigado por contactar o fórum Microsoft Technet!

Hi Hezequias,
You can get the ProjectModifiedDate column in MSP_EPMProject_userView in the Reporting DB where you can
get the data based on the projectUID.
The "last saved" date in the draft DB (be aware that querying in the draft DB is not supported by MS).
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But you can develop custom code upon publishing the project (Event BeforePublish), writing the current
date and username automatically into a custom enterprise field.
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Guillaume Rouyre, MBA, MCP, MCTS |

Modification Date changes when updating Open With?!?!

Forgive me if this is mentioned elsewhere. I have been searching these forums and not seen this problem.
If I do a 'Get Info' on a file in the Finder and change the application it opens with, the Modification Date changes to 'now'. Why in the world would this happen? This is not how 10.3.x worked, and certainly doesn't make any sense since I am not actually modifying the file. I am simply changing the OS's metadata about which app to use. This info isn't even stored in the file itself, as evidenced by burning such an document to a CD or moving it through a network server then opening it on a machine with different default apps for certain extensions.
Is this just another wacky step backwards in the world of the Apple OS X Finder, or am I missing a way to avoid this?
PowerMac G5 2.5DP Mac OS X (10.4.3)

This is not how 10.3.x worked, and certainly doesn't make any sense since I am not actually modifying the file.
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When the "Change all" button is used, the modification date of other files of that type won't be affected by this change since that modification is presumably made somewhere in the "Launch Services" database to set the "default" application to be used for that file type. Perhaps this is what you were thinking of.
However, for that first file (or any file changed individually), the file is in fact modified, and the "Open with" information is stored with the file, in its "resource fork". Usually, a 'usro' resource (specifying the application) and an 'icns' resource (for the app's custom icon for that file type) are added. You can try this yourself - drag any image from Safari.app to the "Desktop" and open the info window for that image - such images usually don't have a "resource fork". Make note of the file's size, then change the "Open with" application. You should immediately see an increase in the file's size (to account for the addition of the "resource fork") accompanied by an update of the file's modification date to reflect this modification.

Run Batch OCR Without Changing File Modification Date

I'm running Acrobat X Pro (as part of CS6) and would like to batch OCR all of the PDFs on my PC (probably over 1,000 files) without changing the "modify" date of the files (otherwise they will all change to the date of the OCR, which will make it more difficult to find files when sorting by date because they'll all come up as the same date). Is there a way to do this?
If I've posted this in the wrong place, please tell me where to post it.
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No. The modification date is a system function and requires access to the file info in the file directory to change, not something that programs normally do. There are programs that allow changing the dates, or used to be anyway. All I know to do is to create a text file with a directory of the PDF files, then go back and change the dates back to those dates. It has been a while since I have played with file dates, but it might be able to be automated (though probably with a fair amount of programming skill).

Modification date changes although nothing changed

Hi all,
any time I open a document with pages the modification date changes although nothing was changed.
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I wonder if it is possible to avoid this.
Any clues?
Greetings, Ronald Hofmann

Yes, of course, what else. Thank you.
There is only one date shown at all.
It shows when last opened and when last changed.
But in my opinion it's not very important when it was last opened.
Much more important is the information when the document was changed.

Folder modification dates spontaneously changing

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