Read Mac OS X Finder file tags in Node.js

read_mac_file_tags.js

var exec = require('child_process').exec;

// Outputs the Mac OS X Finder tags of a file 
// in the same directory as the script.
// Depends on tag (https://github.com/jdberry/tag)

var filename = "some_file_with_tags.md";

readTags(filename);

function readTags ( filename ) {
  var cmdArr = ["tag", "--list", "--no-name", filename];
  var cmd = cmdArr.join(" ");

  exec ( cmd, function(error, stdout, stderr ) {
    if ( error ) { console.error ( error ); }
    if ( stderr ) { console.log( stderr ); }
    if ( stdout ) {
      var tags = stdout.toString().split(",");
      console.log("Tags in file \"" + filename + "\": " + tags);  
    }
    
  }); 
}

This script seems to require that tag, some command-line tool, likely this one, needs to be installed for this to work 🤔

Here's a fix for line 12 that will work:

    const cmdArr = ['mdls', '-raw', '-name', 'kMDItemUserTags', '"' + filename + '"'];

Note it's using mdls which seems to be native to Mac OS -- I found the solution here 😁

Hi @whyboris,
I mention the tag dependency in line 5. But good that you could make it work for yourself.

😅 🙇 so sorry I completely missed the comment -- I'm unsure how 🤦 ... thank you for the gist -- it helped me out 🙇

This will break on a filename with spaces. Best to get rid of var cmd = cmdArr.join(" ") and pass the argument array directly to execFile("tag", args, …) instead