command line utility for changing file labels

Question

is there a command line utility for changing the color label of files in macosx?

Answer 1

You can write it yourself. Open /Applications/Utilities/AppleScript Editor.app and enter the following:

on run argv
    tell application "Finder"
        set theFile to POSIX file (item 1 of argv) as alias
        set labelIdx to (item 2 of argv as number)
        set label index of theFile to labelIdx
    end tell
end run

Save as color.scpt and invoke from Terminal like this:

osascript color.scpt somefile.txt 3

somefile.txt will be colored, 3 is the color: 0 means colorless, 1 through 7 are the Finder's colors (with 1 being red).

Answer 2

This article, View and set Labels from the command line, describes a command line utility to do it. Caveat: it's an old article, describing a utility for OS 10.3, and I haven't tried it myself.

Answer 3

Based on the responses here and in referenced posts, I made the following function and added it to my ~/.bash_profile file:

# Set Finder label color
label(){
  if [ $# -lt 2 ]; then
    echo "USAGE: label [0-7] file1 [file2] ..."
    echo "Sets the Finder label (color) for files"
    echo "Default colors:"
    echo " 0  No color"
    echo " 1  Orange"
    echo " 2  Red"
    echo " 3  Yellow"
    echo " 4  Blue"
    echo " 5  Purple"
    echo " 6  Green"
    echo " 7  Gray"
  else
    osascript - "$@" << EOF
    on run argv
        set labelIndex to (item 1 of argv as number)
        repeat with i from 2 to (count of argv)
          tell application "Finder"
              set theFile to POSIX file (item i of argv) as alias
              set label index of theFile to labelIndex
          end tell
        end repeat
    end run
EOF
  fi
}

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