The touch command is one of the long-established commands that, by default, either creates a file if it doesn’t exist or updates the access and modification times of a file if it does. It’s useful for those situations where behaviour depends upon either the existence or otherwise of a file, or the date of it:
$ ls -l myfile ls: cannot access myfile: No such file or directory $ touch myfile $ ls -l myfile -rw-r--r-- 1 kae kae 0 Jan 25 09:36 myfile $
By default, the times set are the current date and time:
$ date Mon 15 Jan 07:21:42 GMT 2018 $ touch myfile $ ls -l myfile -rw-r--r-- 1 kae kae 0 Jan 15 07:21 myfile
Specify the Date
Its’s possible to set the timestamp of the file to any arbitrary value:
$ ls -l myfile -rw-r--r-- 1 kae kae 0 Jan 15 07:21 myfile $ touch --date="21 July 1969 02:56:15" myfile $ ls -l myfile -rw-r--r-- 1 kae kae 0 Jul 21 1969 myfile $
Show the Time
In the final example above the year is shown in preference to the time because the date of this file in not the current year. One way to see the access and last modified times is with the stat command:
$ stat myfile File: myfile Size: 0 Blocks: 0 IO Block: 4096 regular empty file Device: 27h/39d Inode: 722482 Links: 1 Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--) Uid: ( 1000/ kae) Gid: ( 1000/ kae) Access: 1969-07-21 02:56:15.000000000 +0100 Modify: 1969-07-21 02:56:15.000000000 +0100 Change: 2018-01-15 08:23:49.206066409 +0000 Birth: -
We can customise the stat command to show only the modified and last access times by specifying a format:
$ stat --printf="Access time: %x\nModified time: %y\n" myfile Access time: 1969-07-21 02:56:15.000000000 +0100 Modified time: 1969-07-21 02:56:15.000000000 +0100
Other Ways to Specify Timestamps
It may be more convenient to use the -t option, which allows the time/date to be specified in the format[[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss]:
$ touch -t 196907211354 myfile $ stat --printf="Access time: %x\nModified time: %y\n" myfile Access time: 1969-07-21 13:54:00.000000000 +0100 Modified time: 1969-07-21 13:54:00.000000000 +0100
By default, both the last access time and the modification time are set with touch. That can be changed by using the -a (change only the access time) or -m (only the modification time) options:
$ touch -a -t 201712250300 myfile $ stat --printf="Access time: %x\nModified time: %y\n" myfile Access time: 2017-12-25 03:00:00.000000000 +0000 Modified time: 1969-07-21 13:54:00.000000000 +0100
In Closing
Both stat and touch are handy commands to have up your sleeve for when they’re really needed.
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