Change File Creation Date on Mac: 26 Commands Tested
There are three ways to change a file's creation date on a Mac from Terminal, and each has a catch. touch changes it only when you move the date backwards, and only on APFS and HFS+. SetFile -d changes it everywhere, but it's deprecated, needs the Command Line Tools, and turned 01/01/1969 into a creation date in the year 2105 while printing nothing and exiting 0. Then the new date has to survive. A plain cp -p threw mine away and put the modification date in its place.
I tested this on my Mac mini (macOS 26.4.1) with 26 commands, each run on a fresh file on four scratch disk images: APFS, HFS+, exFAT and FAT32. Then I copied and edited a backdated file 26 more ways to see which tools keep the date. All the results and scripts are listed at the end.
The short answer
# Set the creation date (any format, any date 1970-2038)
SetFile -d "01/15/2020 09:30:00" file.pdf
# Set modification and access time; on APFS/HFS+ this also pulls
# the creation date back if the new date is earlier
touch -t 202001150930 file.pdf
# Check all three
stat -f "created %SB modified %Sm accessed %Sa" file.pdfAlways write the time in the SetFile string. Leave it off and you get a wrong time, which I'll explain below. If you don't have the Command Line Tools, xcode-select --install puts SetFile and GetFileInfo in /usr/bin.
fskit).Why touch only works backwards
touch sets the access and modification times. It has no option for the creation date, on Apple's version or on GNU's. What moves the creation date is the file system. Apple's HFS+ source code spells it out in hfs_vnops.c: "The utimes system call can reset the modification time but it doesn't know about HFS create times. So we need to ensure that the creation time is always at least as old as the modification time." When a new modification time is older than the creation time, the creation time is lowered to match.
APFS isn't open source, but in my runs it did the same thing. That means anything that sets the modification time backwards also moves the creation date: touch -m on its own, touch -A -010000 (shift back one hour), and SetFile -m. touch -a doesn't, because it only sets the access time. A date in the future changes the modification time and leaves the creation date alone, so you can never move a creation date forward with touch.
There was one difference between APFS and HFS+. touch -t 196001011200 moved the creation date back to 1960 on HFS+. On APFS the modification time became 1960 and the creation date stayed at today.
Apple's touch -d is stricter than it looks. It wants YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:SS, and a space works in place of the T, but the seconds are required. touch -d "2020-01-01 12:00" fails with out of range or illegal time specification, and so does "2 years ago". GNU gtouch from Homebrew's coreutils accepts both. I hit the same split with date in date: illegal option -- d on Mac.
SetFile: works everywhere, guesses silently
SetFile -d writes the creation date directly, and it worked on all four file systems, including FAT32. Its man page says it was deprecated with Xcode 6 and that the date "must be in the Unix epoch, that is, between 1/1/1970 and 1/18/2038". In practice it doesn't check either limit, and it accepts some bad input without an error:
What I passed to SetFile -d | Creation date I got | Exit |
|---|---|---|
"01/15/2020 09:30:00" | 2020-01-15 09:30:00 | 0 |
"02/03/2020" (no time) | 2020-02-03 02:03:00 | 0 |
"12/31/2020" (no time) | 2020-12-31 12:31:00 | 0 |
"13/01/2020 12:00:00" (day first) | 2019-12-02 12:00:00 | 0 |
"02/30/2020 12:00:00" | 2020-03-01 12:00:00 | 0 |
"01/01/1969 12:00:00" | 2105-02-07 18:28:16 | 0 |
"01/01/69 12:00:00" | 2069-01-01 12:00:00 | 0 |
"01/01/2040 12:00:00" | 2040-01-01 12:00:00 (past the documented limit, but correct) | 0 |
"2020-01-01 12:00:00" | unchanged, ERROR: invalid date (expected MM/DD/[YY]YY) | 2 |
The date-only rows are the ones that will catch people, because the man page shows the time as optional. Without it, SetFile reuses the month and day as hours and minutes.
The 1969 row is worse because SetFile's own reader hides it. GetFileInfo -d prints 01/01/1969 12:00:00, so the change looks right. stat, Foundation's FileManager and Spotlight's kMDItemFSCreationDate all read 2105-02-07, and that's the value other apps get from the file system. The value wrapped around a 32-bit counter. At the other edge, a creation date of exactly 1 January 1970 00:00 UTC is correct in stat but GetFileInfo shows it as 1904. For dates before 1970, use the Swift route below instead.
Without SetFile: four lines of Swift
The supported API is FileAttributeKey.creationDate in Foundation. swift ships with the Command Line Tools too, so this isn't fewer dependencies, but it takes a Unix timestamp and handles dates outside 1970-2038:
// setcr.swift -- build: swiftc -O setcr.swift -o setcr
import Foundation
let a = CommandLine.arguments // setcr <unix-seconds> <path>
try FileManager.default.setAttributes(
[.creationDate: Date(timeIntervalSince1970: Double(a[1])!)], ofItemAtPath: a[2])A creation date in 1960 stored and read back correctly on APFS, HFS+ and exFAT. FAT32 turned it into 2096. A date in 2050 worked on all four. Get the timestamp with date -j -f "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S" "1960-01-01 12:00:00" +%s.
One reader to distrust: Python's os.stat().st_birthtime returned 1.84467440733939e+19 for that 1960 file on all four Pythons I had (3.9.6, 3.12.13, 3.13.15 and 3.14.8). The BSD stat -f %SB read it correctly. If you check results from a Python script, pre-1970 dates will look broken even when they aren't.
Keeping the date: most copies lose it
I backdated a file to a creation date of 2020-01-01 and a modification date of 2023-01-01, then copied it on the same APFS volume:
| Command | Creation date on the copy |
|---|---|
cp -c, GNU gcp, gcp -p, mv | 2020-01-01, kept |
cp -p, ditto, rsync -a, tar, zip/unzip, ditto -c -k/-x -k | 2023-01-01, the modification date |
cp, cp -R, gcp --reflink=never | today |
cp -p or ditto to exFAT or FAT32 | today |
The middle row is the HFS rule again. The copy is created now, the tool then restores the old modification time, and the file system pulls the creation date back to match. The result is a believable date, so it's easy to miss that it's the wrong one. Only clones keep the real creation date. cp -c asks for a clone, and GNU cp clones on APFS by default. With --reflink=never it fell into the same rows as Apple's cp. My ditto command test and Apple Archive vs zip post found the same thing from the archive side. Apple's aa was the one archiver that brought the creation date back.
Editing in place matters too. echo >>, a Python open(f, "w"), vim, chmod and xattr -w kept the creation date. sed -i '', perl -pi and a write-to-temp-then-rename save reset it to today, because they replace the file with a new one.
Batch: set creation date to modification date
Apple Stack Exchange's main thread on this, "Changing Creation Date of a file", had 158,853 views when I checked, and its top answer (142 votes) states the same touch rule I measured. A follow-up asks how to set the creation date to the modification date, which is what cp -p did to my file by accident. With SetFile, quoting each name:
for f in *.jpg; do
SetFile -d "$(GetFileInfo -m "$f")" "$f"
doneGetFileInfo -m prints MM/DD/YYYY hh:mm:ss with the time included, so it avoids the date-only trap. The 1970-2038 range still applies. touch can't do this job in the usual case, because a file's modification date is normally newer than its creation date and touch can only pull the creation date backwards.
FAQ
How do I change a file's creation date on Mac?
Use SetFile -d "MM/DD/YYYY hh:mm:ss" file in Terminal. It comes with the Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install) and works on APFS, HFS+, exFAT and FAT32. Always include the time, and keep the date between 1970 and 2038. touch can also move a creation date earlier on APFS and HFS+, but never later.
Can touch change the creation date on Mac?
Only indirectly. touch sets the modification time, and APFS and HFS+ lower the creation date when the new modification time is older than it. touch to a later date leaves the creation date alone, and on exFAT and FAT32 touch never changes it.
Why did my copied file get the wrong creation date?
cp -p, ditto, rsync -a and tar create a new file and then restore the old modification time. The file system then sets the creation date to that modification time. Copy with cp -c (a clone on the same APFS volume) or move with mv within the same volume to keep the original creation date.
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How this was tested: Mac mini, macOS 26.4.1 (25E253), Apple touch from file_cmds-479, GNU touch 9.12 from Homebrew coreutils, SetFile and GetFileInfo from the Command Line Tools, Swift 6.3.2. Each of the 26 setter cases ran on a new file on 64 MB sparse images formatted APFS, HFS+, exFAT and MS-DOS FAT32, in the Asia/Seoul time zone, and was read back with stat, GetFileInfo and FileManager. The copy and edit tests ran 26 more commands. Background reading: Apple's touch man page, the GNU touch manual and the SetFile reference. For reading the dates back in scripts, see stat on Mac.