Creating Files

Small, Sharp Software Tools — by Brian P. Hogan (41 / 107)

👈 Chapter 4 Working with Files and Directories | TOC | Reading Larger Files 👉

In ​Creating and Reading Files​, you learned how to use the echo command and redirection to create files. This is one of many ways to create files on the command line. Let’s look at a few alternatives.

If you only need to create an empty file, you can use the touch command. This command is designed to update the timestamp of a file. It’s common for programs to watch a file for changes and then react to those changes by executing a process. For example, you might have a process that runs tests whenever a file changes, but you don’t actually want to open the file and make a change. You can use touch to modify the file without actually changing the contents. This would then trigger the program or process monitoring the file.

However, if the specified file doesn’t exist, the touch command creates the file. This makes touch a very popular tool for creating files quickly.

Test it out. Navigate to your home directory:

Now, use touch to create a new file named file.txt:

Verify that it exists by using the ls -lh command:

The file doesn’t have any contents, but it was created successfully. This is a handy way to create a blank file that you can then modify elsewhere.

Remember that touch updates a file’s timestamp whenever you run it. Wait a minute and run the touch command on this file again. Then get a new listing:

You’ll notice that the timestamp has changed.

You can use touch to operate on more than one file at once. All you have to do is provide it with a list of filenames, separated with spaces. Give it a try:

This creates the three files, index.html, about.html, and style.css in the current directory. Verify this with the ls command:

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