NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | DATE STRING | AUTHOR | REPORTING BUGS | COPYRIGHT | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

TOUCH(1)                        User Commands                       TOUCH(1)

NAME         top

       touch - change file timestamps

SYNOPSIS         top

       touch [OPTION]... FILE...

DESCRIPTION         top

       Update the access and modification times of each FILE to the current
       time.
       A FILE argument that does not exist is created empty, unless -c or -h
       is supplied.
       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)
       -h, --no-dereference
              affect each symbolic link instead of any referenced file
              (useful only on systems that can change the timestamps of a
              symlink)
       -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.

DATE STRING         top

       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.

AUTHOR         top

       Written by Paul Rubin, Arnold Robbins, Jim Kingdon, David MacKenzie,
       and Randy Smith.

REPORTING BUGS         top

       GNU coreutils online help: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/>
       Report touch translation bugs to
       <http://translationproject.org/team/>

COPYRIGHT         top

       Copyright © 2017 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.

SEE ALSO         top

       Full documentation at: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/touch>
       or available locally via: info '(coreutils) touch invocation'

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the coreutils (basic file, shell and text
       manipulation utilities) project.  Information about the project can
       be found at ⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/⟩.  If you have a
       bug report for this manual page, see 
       ⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/⟩.  This page was obtained from
       the tarball coreutils-8.27.tar.xz fetched from 
       ⟨http://www.gnutls.org/download.html⟩ on 2017-07-05.  If you discover
       any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you
       believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or
       you have corrections or improvements to the information in this
       COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail
       to man-pages@man7.org
GNU coreutils 8.27               March 2017                         TOUCH(1)

Pages that refer to this page: last(1@@util-linux)utime(2)utimensat(2)systemd-update-done.service(8)