Search & Replace Across Notes That Preserves the File's Date Modified Value

I would like to be able to bulk update my notes with a Search & Replace feature, but not have that operation update the Date Modified attributes of the updated files.

For example, I would like to clean-up tags that exist in numerous files as I evolve my tagging methodology. Updating the Data Modified value when the file is updated is misleading when sorting notes chronologically, however, because that date indicates when the content was changed, which isn’t really accurate if only the tag metadata is changed.

The “Preserve Date Modified” feature would be turned on and off as needed, when bulk updates are actually relevant to the note content (as opposed to just the note metadata).

Is this a reasonable feature, or am I missing something?

Thanks,

Mike

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@MYX-Notes
Have you ever found a solution for this? I’m trying to do the same thing with Tag Wrangler, for a few hundred notes that contain wrong tags.

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No, it’s still something that I would like to do without losing compromising the last update attribute.

There might be better answers, but if you’re comfortable scripting? as a workaround I would personally go outside Obsidian and handle this in a bash script, or any scripting language that can do the “touch” command. Python, for example can access touch.

You could query the existing modified date. Do the change and then set it again using “touch”.

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I looked into this a while ago, and the best I could find was a utility that had the ability to capture a folder of file timestamps and save to a file, than reapply the timestamps from the saved file. Never acted on it, though. It would still be a nice capability to have built-in, though.