Comments on: 10 practical examples of Touch command on Linux

By: Chancletto

Chancletto — Sat, 06 Mar 2021 03:40:13 +0000

The best way to explain this is to start by explaining what exactly are access, modification, change, creation and birth time

By: Rajasekhar

Rajasekhar — Fri, 29 Jun 2018 17:48:58 +0000

Hi,
I want to create sequence from 1..10 but I don’t want 2 & 5 number files is there any way to create particular sequence files

By: Alex Wang

Alex Wang — Fri, 24 Jun 2016 10:03:05 +0000

very good, the article is very clearly and the script very smart.

By: peniscola

peniscola — Wed, 25 May 2016 15:49:39 +0000

Actually the {A..Z} syntaxes have nothing to do with touch, but with your shell expansion capabilities.
Try this with dash, for an example where it doesn’t work:

bash:/tmp/test$ dash
$ touch {A..Z}
$ ls
{A..Z}

By: Ricardo Naranjo

Ricardo Naranjo — Mon, 09 May 2016 23:39:41 +0000

Practical is when you combine touch with find command… if you are synchronizing two computers you may touch a file then work lot into of files and when you need to synchronize you use the command:

tar jcvf modified_files.tar.bz2 `find ~ -newer ~/touched_file.dat`

Then yoy may untar this modified_files into the other computer and BINGO!

By: TR Rudkin

TR Rudkin — Mon, 09 May 2016 23:03:21 +0000

I have another., generally used as part of a build process
track releases just by the time portion of the file
touch -d ’02:05′ my_script

marks the file as second version, fifth revision.

By: Drive-By Comment

Drive-By Comment — Mon, 09 May 2016 02:42:59 +0000

touch is a nice command :D

Pretty sure
# Create 10K files
$ touch {1..10}{1..1000}
doesn’t give you a nice tidy range of numbers like you might/would/could want (it’s not multiplication!). It should give you a weird mix where your first number is 11 and your 10000th number will be named 101000 and because there are no leading zeros it wont sort nicely either. Which can be all fine and dandy.

I haven’t bothered to try {1..10000} but maybe that will actually work and give you what’s intended (and faster to type). Still no leading zeros though.

However instead one could do
$ touch {0..9}{0..9}{0..9}{0..9}
because each individual digit is 0 to 9 (it is a regular expression after all). First file is 0000 and 10000th file is 9999.

Or if you’re allergic to counting from 0 and/or do NOT want tidy numbers with leading zeros and for whatever reason {1..10000} doesn’t work (because I didn’t test that one) then one can do
$ for x in `seq 1 10000`; do touch $x; done

(No I didn’t test it to 10000, I did something like “for i in `seq 2 12`; do touch $i.okay; done” instead).

Anyway it all depends/it might not be important at all and one just want 10000 files named whatever :)

*speeds off into the distance* :)