If you’ve ever had to use MDCopyItemAttribute in a method that should be rather fast, you know how slow it is. NSFileManager’s fileAttributesAtPath:traverseLink:, on the other hand, is really fast compared to it.

So I’m using the kMDItemLastUsedDate attribute to sort my NSMenuItems in a menu, based on when they were last used. However, sorting the items of a menu takes very long if I use MDItemRef, etc. If I use NSFileManger’s methods, it’s much, much faster.

Now, to finally come to a point, there is no way to get the LastUsed attribute of a file through NSFileManager, is there? MDCopy…. is just too slow for my purposes.

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What about using stat(2)? Probably can’t get much faster than that. — http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man2/stat.2.html