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 }
}