Tagging files with colors in OS X Finder from shell scripts

Question

One can tag files and folders with a color in the Mac OS X Finder. Is there a way to do this from a shell script?

Answer 1

One ugly way to do this would be:

exec osascript <<\EOF
tell app "Finder"

    -- [...]
    -- selecting the file
    -- [...]

    -- 4 is Blue
    set label index of thisItem to 4
end tell

Basically launching an applescript that uses finder to set the color.

I got the hints from:

(Color) http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070602122413306

(Shell) http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20040617170055379

Answer 2

This shell script takes the file or folder name as its first argument and the label index (0 for no label, 1 for red, ..., 7 for gray) as its second argument.

#!/bin/sh
osascript -e "tell application \"Finder\" to set label index of alias POSIX file \"`cd -P -- "$(dirname -- "$1")" && printf '%s\n' "$(pwd -P)/$(basename -- "$1")"`\" to $2"

More directly, if $filename is a shell variable with the absolute path name of the file or folder to be labeled and $label is a shell variable with the label index number,

osascript -e "tell application \"Finder\" to set label index of alias POSIX file \"$filename\" to $label"

is a shell command to assign the label to the file or folder.