If there isn’t a file with the specified name, touch command will create it for you if permissions allow it: ubuntu$ ls try You simply specify the filename as a command line parameter, no oother options are needed. The default behavior of touch command is to change all three timestamps associated with a file to the current system time. Changing timestamps of a time to the current system time Ranging from source control approaches to storage usage analysis, there are processes out there which rely on the timestamps associated with each file and directory of yours.Īfter all, it’s always useful to know when the file was last modified or when somebody tried to access its contents. There are quite a few legitimate reasons why you may want to update timestamps on a certain file.

In short, it updates file timestamps – access and modification ones (atime and mtime respectively).

Touch command is one of these little but extremely useful tools in Unix and Linux which you may have used for quite sometime before realizing their full potential.

Ubuntu find files by date modified