TOUCH("1") manual page
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touch - change file timestamps
touch [OPTION]... FILE...
Update the access and modification times of each FILE to the current time.
A FILE argument that does not exist is created empty.
A FILE argument string
of - is handled specially and causes touch to change the times of the file
associated with standard output.
Mandatory arguments to long options are
mandatory for short options too.
- -a
- change only the access time
- -c, --no-create
- do not create any files
- -d, --date=STRING
- parse STRING and use it instead
of current time
- -f
- (ignored)
- -m
- change only the modification time
- -r, --reference=FILE
- use this file’s times instead of current time
- -t STAMP
- use [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss]
instead of current time
- --time=WORD
- change the specified time: WORD is access,
atime, or use: equivalent to -a WORD is modify or mtime: equivalent to -m
- --help
- display this help and exit
- --version
- output version information and
exit
Note that the -d and -t options accept different time-date formats.
The --date=STRING is a mostly free format human readable date string
such as "Sun, 29 Feb 2004 16:21:42 -0800" or "2004-02-29 16:21:42" or even
"next Thursday". A date string may contain items indicating calendar date,
time of day, time zone, day of week, relative time, relative date, and
numbers. An empty string indicates the beginning of the day. The date string
format is more complex than is easily documented here but is fully described
in the info documentation.
Written by Paul Rubin, Arnold Robbins,
Jim Kingdon, David MacKenzie, and Randy Smith.
Report bugs
to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org>.
Copyright © 2008 Free Software Foundation,
Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There
is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
The full documentation
for touch is maintained as a Texinfo manual. If the info and touch programs
are properly installed at your site, the command
- info coreutils ’touch invocation’
should give you access to the complete manual.
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