I’m bulk editing a bunch of KiCad footprints (a.k.a. modules) in a text editor. Said footprints have a tedit field, which turns out is a hex-coded timestamp. This means to properly edit a KiCad footprint in a text editor, you should update that field when you save it.
A one-liner for producing a hex-coded timestamp in Linux bash is:
printf "%X\n" $(date +%s)