Tagging files with colors in OS X Finder from shell scripts

macos applescript finder
Ralf Ebert picture Ralf Ebert · Mar 12, 2010 · Viewed 9.3k times · Source

One can tag files and folders with a color in the Mac OS X Finder. Is there a way to do this from a shell script?

Answer

Isaac picture Isaac · Mar 12, 2010

This shell script takes the file or folder name as its first argument and the label index (0 for no label, 1 for red, ..., 7 for gray) as its second argument.

#!/bin/sh
osascript -e "tell application \"Finder\" to set label index of alias POSIX file \"`cd -P -- "$(dirname -- "$1")" && printf '%s\n' "$(pwd -P)/$(basename -- "$1")"`\" to $2"

More directly, if $filename is a shell variable with the absolute path name of the file or folder to be labeled and $label is a shell variable with the label index number,

osascript -e "tell application \"Finder\" to set label index of alias POSIX file \"$filename\" to $label"

is a shell command to assign the label to the file or folder.

Related questions

Adding a script to MacOS finder contextual menu

I want to add an option to the finder context menu that calls hg add %1 with %1 being the full path of the selected file in finder. Of course there are more useful cases I can think of, to add to …

Read More
How to make a script to show/hide hidden files in Mac OS X?

I just got my MBP with Retina and i'm really new to the Mac OS X (using PC before). I noticed that the Mac doesn't have a GUI to show/hide hidden files like Windows. I've researched and saw this …

Read More
Set position of window with AppleScript

I'm trying to set the position of the Messages.app chat window using AppleScript. tell application "System Events" set position of window 1 of application "Messages" to {100, 100} end tell With this code I get an error: error "Messages got an error: …

Read More