change is possible

one of my usb hard drives went belly-up lately, and so i replaced it & in the process rearranged all my hard drives & backups.  the files all move ok, but i find that the folder datestamps are all wrong, which is a pain.

i couldn’t find any routine that would do that quickly & easily.  so i wrote (and so i’m sharing also) this windows powershell routine to correct the folder datestamps.  the timestamp turns out to be midnight (00:00) but i didn’t care about that.

to run the routine

create a .ps1 batch file to call the powershell routine.  copy the ps1 batch file & the ps1 script file into the same folder where the folders to update are..  run the ps1 batchfile.

note! the routine fails on all but basic characters, and on a lot of them too.  so folders with names including @ [ ] & and some other characters are a problem.  (i fix that when i create the ps1 batch file in excel, actually.)

ps1 batch file syntax

.\folderdate_v3.ps1 "foldername" "yyyy-mm-dd" "reference"

including the ” as shown above, where
.\  is because i copy the files into the same folder as noted above
folderdate_v3.ps1  is the name of the routine to run
“foldername” is the name of the folder to update
“yyyy-mm-dd” is the new date stamp (e.g. “2016-06-01”)
“reference” is any text you want (it will display on the output but doesn’t actually do anything

this file can have as many lines as you want, 1 line per folder to update.

sample file: folderdateBAT.zip

the ps1 script

this is stored in a separate .ps1 file.  i called my file ‘folderdate_v3.ps1’

sample file: folderdate_v3.zip

param([string]$Vfoldername = $args[0], [string]$Vdate = $args[1], [string]$Vcat = $args[2])

$Vtestpath = Test-Path $Vfoldername

if ( $Vdate -eq '1900-01-00') 
 { Write-Host "Skipped (date)" $Vcat " " $Vdate " " $Vfoldername} 
else
 { 
 if ( $Vtestpath -eq 'True')
 { 
 $a = get-item $Vfoldername
 $a.CreationTime = $Vdate
 $a.LastWriteTime = $Vdate
 $a.LastAccessTime = $Vdate
 Write-Host "UPDATED" $Vcat " " $Vdate " " $Vfoldername
 }
 else { Write-Host "Skipped (path)" $Vcat " " $Vdate " " $Vfoldername }
 }

i recently ran across avidemux, “a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks”.  i actually only use it for demuxing the audio streams of video downloads, but recommend it over the other demux options that i’ve tried.  i’m not interested in video editing, i don’t want to change the audio format at all (except for listening in my car ^^ )… i just want an unchanged, demuxed copy of the audio stream.  and avidemux seems to do just that, quickly, and even lets you pick which audio stream if there’s more than one.  there have been a few shows that wouldn’t demux – i’m not sure why – but generally it’s worked great.

• homepage (just links):   http://www.avidemux.org/
• sourceforge:  http://avidemux.sourceforge.net/