I found a way to extract the creation date of a pdf and I would like to use it as part of the new filename. However, I want the date to be in the format "mmddyy" and it is returning at "mmddyyyy". How can I remove the first "yy" using either bash or applescript?

Here is the code that I am using to get the date to the 8 digit form:

mdls $f | grep kMDItemContentCreationDate | head -n1 | awk '{gsub("[^[:digit:]] "," ");print $2$3$1}'

Is there a way to modify this to only return the 6 digit date or do I need to do something to the 8 digit return?

I have tried assigning variables to different awk commands to extract pieces of the string but that isn't working.

CodePudding user response：

Since you already have an awk command that parses the date (printed in ISO format yyyy-mm-dd ... by mdls) it would make sense to adapt that command instead of adding another.

I don't have a mac, so I cannot try this. From what I found, it seems mdls prints something like this:

$ mdls -name kMDItemContentCreationDate file.pdf
kMDItemContentCreationDate = 2023-01-25 17:25:43 -0200

From that output, you extract the separate numbers (the first number$1 is the year, the second number $2 the month and so on) and change their order (print $2$3$1).

To remove the first two digits of the year ($1) you can take the substring starting at the 3rd digit of that number (substr($1,3), assuming that all years have exactly four digits) or take the remainder when dividing by 100 (the modulo operator % does this):

$ mdls -name kMDItemContentCreationDate file.pdf |
  awk '{gsub("[^0-9] "," "); print $2 $3 $10}'
012523

CodePudding user response：

Kudos to Socowi - adding the CLI option for creation date removed the need for grep and head, and is the better solution, but I wanted to point out that awk still eliminates the need for both in those cases where you don't have the better option of reducing and simplifying your input.

mdls "$f" | awk '/kMDItemContentCreationDate/{gsub("[^[:digit:]] "," ");print $2$3$1; exit}'