[headbirth]

Are there any commandline tools that allow you to add comments to files? It would be nice to write a script to batch process a bunch of files.

[Turias]

What do you mean "Add comments to files"? Do you want to add a header of comments to a bunch of C files? How complicated is the task?

[headbirth]

Instead of having to select a file in the finder and hit cmd-I to add a comment I was wondering if this could be done with a command line tool.

[Mithras]

I don't know, but I would love such a tool. Someone proficient in Carbon could probably whip one up in thirty minutes...

[headbirth]

Is there a reason it has to be a Carbon app?

[Earth Mk. II]

You could probably do it with Apple Script...

[suthercd]

This is scriptable through the Finder. A file is a a subclass of the item class. Item has the comment property which can be read or written to. Here is an example script to get you started.

Code:
set _file to choose file
set _comment to ""
set _name to ""
tell application "Finder"
    set _comment to comment of _file
    set _name to name of _file
end tell

display dialog "The comment in Get Info of file " & _name & " is: " & _comment buttons{"OK"}

To change or add a comment edit the line 'set _comment to ""' to 'set comment to 'my comment'. Then change the line 'set _comment to comment of _file' to 'set comment of _file to _comment'

Use a repeat loop to do a batch of files. You could create a list of different comments, and base which one is added on file name, suffix, date modified or created, label, size, location...lots of possibilities.

HTH
Craig

[Moonray]

Tcsh users can just put

Code:
alias setcomment osascript -e "'"'tell application "Finder" to set comment of alias POSIX file "'\!:2\*'" to "'"'\!^'"'"'"'"
alias getcomment osascript -e "'"'tell application "Finder" to return comment of alias POSIX file "'\!\*'"'"'"

in their ~/.cshrc or ~/.tcshrc file (bash users know what to do instead).

You have then two new aliases: getcomment <file> returns the comment of a file, setcomment <comment> <file> sets a file comment.

Note:

• You have to put the comment in quotes if it contains spaces or any special characters for the shell
• You cannot use wildcards in the filename
• There is no special error handling
• Don't ask me about the quotes

-

[headbirth]

And how would OnMyCommand CM users phrase it?

[headbirth]

Ran across this and thought I would pass it along:
http://sveinbjorn.vefsyn.is/osxutils