Manipulating file modification times in bulk

[Nils Kassube]

Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
> I've got a bunch of SVG files created at various times; these are
> shared with a bunch of folks via a web server.
> 
> Some browsers cannot view the raw SVG files, but can view them via an
> HTML file, so what I actually present is a directory of the HTML
> files.  These are created by a script and are very simple wrappers.
> 
> I would like the file modification times to be changed to the mtime of
> the SVG file.  I can see some of the tools to do that, such as
> touch(1) with --date.  It's not obvious to me how best to have a
> script acquire the string representation of the dates.  Any
> suggestions.

How about this for an individual file?

touch -r filename.svg filename.html

Of course you could do it for all files at once with a short script like 
this:

for f in *.svg;do
  touch -r "$f" "${f%svg}html"
done


Nils