touch

touch [OPTION]... [FILE]...

Update the access and modification times of each FILE to the current time.

Options

--help

Print help information.

-a

change only the access time

-t <STAMP>

use [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] instead of the current time

--date=<STRING>, -d <STRING>

parse argument and use it instead of current time

-f

(ignored)

-m

change only the modification time

--no-create, -c

do not create any files

--no-dereference, -h

affect each symbolic link instead of any referenced file (only for systems that can change the timestamps of a symlink)

--reference=<FILE>, -r <FILE>

use this file’s times instead of the current time

--time=<WORD>

change only the specified time: “access”, “atime”, or “use” are equivalent to -a; “modify” or “mtime” are equivalent to -m

Examples

Create specific files:

touch {{path/to/file1 path/to/file2 ...}}

Set the file [a]ccess or [m]odification times to the current one and don’t create file if it doesn’t exist:

touch {{[-c|--no-create]}} {{-a|-m}} {{path/to/file1 path/to/file2 ...}}

Set the file [t]ime to a specific value and don’t create file if it doesn’t exist:

touch {{[-c|--no-create]}} -t {{YYYYMMDDHHMM.SS}} {{path/to/file1 path/to/file2 ...}}

Set the files’ timestamp to the reference file’s timestamp, and do not create the file if it does not exist:

touch {{[-c|--no-create]}} {{[-r|--reference]}} {{path/to/reference_file}} {{path/to/file1 path/to/file2 ...}}

Set the timestamp by parsing a string:

touch {{[-d|--date]}} "{{last year|5 hours|next thursday|nov 14|...}}" {{path/to/file}}

Create multiple files with an increasing number:

touch {{path/to/file{1..10}}}

Create multiple files with a letter range:

touch {{path/to/file{a..z}}}

The examples are provided by the tldr-pages project under the CC BY 4.0 License.

Please note that, as uutils is a work in progress, some examples might fail.