macos - 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

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 -- "$1")" && printf '%s
' "$(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.