Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index touch is a program on Unix and Unix-like systems used for changing the date and timestamp on a file, but is also often used for creating an empty file. The command-syntax is: touch [options] If that file exists, its current details are updated as if a user edited the file and saved it again, but if the file does not exist, a file with the name specified in the current directory will be created with a timestamp corresponding to the present time of the system clock. touch can also be invoked with a plethora of options to change the files timestamp to something other than the current date and time. The version of touch bundled in coreutils that is distributed by the FSF and found on most GNU/Linux systems was written by Paul Rubin, Arnold Robbins, Jim Kingdon, David MacKenzie and Randy Smith. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.