How can you get MAC times/file attributes from all files in directory on Mac OS

Question

I am trying to figure out a way to get all MAC times and other file attributes for all files in a directory for the past 7 days.

I have tried variations of the "Find command multiple options | xargs stat -x", but still not getting what I am looking for.

Answer 1

The shell command you need is stat -x * . Here's how you can run that in Python:

import subprocess

filesPath = "/path/to/folder/*" # use /*.* instead to capture files only, no directories

allData = subprocess.run("stat -x " + filesPath, shell=True, capture_output=True,
    universal_newlines=True).stdout

That will give you one giant string with all of the output from stat . If you want to format that into a nice list of dictionaries for each file, you can use this:

import re

files = [("File: " + f).strip() for f in allData.split("File: ")]

fileDictList = [dict(re.findall(r"(\w+): (.*?)\s*(?=\w+: |$)", fileData)) for fileData in files]

Then you'll end up with something like the following in fileDictList :

[{'Access': 'Tue Jul  7 19:02:47 2020',
  'Change': 'Tue Jul  7 19:02:46 2020',
  'Device': '1,4',
  'File': '"/Users/bob/Documents/a.png"',
  'FileType': 'Regular File',
  'Gid': '(   20/   staff)',
  'Inode': '6754586',
  'Links': '1',
  'Mode': '(0644/-rw-r--r--)',
  'Modify': 'Wed Jun 17 01:36:53 2020',
  'Size': '620729',
  'Uid': '(  501/bob)'},

 {'Access': 'Tue Jul  7 19:02:47 2020',
  'Change': 'Tue Jul  7 19:02:46 2020',
  'Device': '1,4',
  'File': '"/Users/bob/Documents/b.png"',
  'FileType': 'Regular File',
  'Gid': '(   20/   staff)',
  'Inode': '6754585',
  'Links': '1',
  'Mode': '(0644/-rw-r--r--)',
  'Modify': 'Wed Jun 17 01:36:52 2020',
  'Size': '839719',
  'Uid': '(  501/bob)'}]