akweteco01: Set StarRating from CLI

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Set StarRating from CLI

Using information found in the article listed in the Comprehensive summary of Mac Metadata hint, I was able to find a way to write metadata from the CLI, making it possible for shell scripts to modify files in a way that is visible to the Finder, and therefor in Smart Folders and other search results.

Using xattr on the CLI you can write arbitrary metadata to files. This is useful for other CLI scripts because you can search for these arbitrary attributes using mdls. However, if you want to set metadata that is easily searchable in applications like Finder, you have to set the values for existing attributes. Looking through the output of mdimport -X, I located the StarRating attribute as a valuable piece of information to set values for. To set this value for a file, issue the following command:

xattr -w "com.apple.metadata:kMDItemStarRating" "10" fi ...