• Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    But this directly goes against that philosophy, since now instead of changing timestamps it’s also creating files

    • kautau@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      You can pass -c to not create a file, but it does go against the philosophy that it creates them by default instead of that being an option

      EDIT: Looking closer into the code, it would appear to maybe be an efficiency thing based on underlying system calls

      Without that check, touch just opens a file for writing, with no other filesystem check, and closes it

      With that check, touch first checks if the file exists, and then if so opens the file for writing