Google Cloud Storage : What is the easiest way to update timestamp of all files under all subfolders

Question

I have datewise folders in the form of root-dir/yyyy/mm/dd under which there are so many files present.

I want to update the timestamp of all the files falling under certain date-range, for example 2 weeks ie. 14 folders, so that these these files can be picked up by my file-Streaming Data Ingestion process.

What is the easiest way to achieve this? Is there a way in UI console? or is it through gsutil? please help

Answer 1

When you say "folders in the form of root-dir/yyyy/mm/dd", do you mean that you're copying those objects into your bucket with names like gs://my-bucket/root-dir/2016/12/25/christmas.jpg? If not, see Mike's answer; but if they are named with that pattern and you just want to rename them, you could use gsutil's mv command to rename every object with that prefix:

$ export BKT=my-bucket
$ gsutil ls gs://$BKT/**
gs://my-bucket/2015/12/31/newyears.jpg
gs://my-bucket/2016/01/15/file1.txt
gs://my-bucket/2016/01/15/some/file.txt
gs://my-bucket/2016/01/15/yet/another-file.txt

$ gsutil -m mv gs://$BKT/2016/01/15 gs://$BKT/2016/06/20
[...]
Operation completed over 3 objects/12.0 B.

# We can see that the prefixes changed from 2016/01/15 to 2016/06/20
$ gsutil ls gs://$BKT/**
gs://my-bucket/2015/12/31/newyears.jpg
gs://my-bucket/2016/06/20/file1.txt
gs://my-bucket/2016/06/20/some/file.txt
gs://my-bucket/2016/06/20/yet/another-file.txt

Answer 2

GCS objects are immutable, so the only way to "update" the timestamp would be to copy each object on top of itself, e.g., using:

gsutil cp gs://your-bucket/object1 gs://your-bucket/object1

(and looping over all objects you want to do this to). This is a fast (metadata-only) operation, which will create a new generation of each object, with a current timestamp.

Note that if you have versioning enabled on the bucket doing this will create an extra version of each file you copy this way.