Technology Tales

Adventures in consumer and enterprise technology

A quick way to create a blank text file

Published on 27^th June 2008 Estimated Reading Time: 1 minute

The primary job done by the touch command in UNIX or Linux is to update the time stamps on files. However, it also has another function: creating an empty text file where you are "touching" a file that doesn't exist. This has its uses, particularly when you want to reduce the amount of pointing and clicking that you need to do, or you want to generate a series of empty files in a shell script. Whatever you do with it is up to you.

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