bug#7008: On "touch" command

[Eric Blake]

On 09/10/2010 03:30 AM, Dibyajyoti Ghosh wrote:
> Hi,
>      I needed to change the timestamp of a directory structure of very high
> depth. and in each level there are lots of files and folders.
> So I expected a recursive operation of "touch" (like -R in chmod or in chown
> etc.).

Thanks for the report.  However, we are reluctant to bloat any more 
tools with recursive traversal than absolutely necessary - the whole 
Unix philosophy is that each tool should do one thing well, rather than 
making every tool copy common actions from other tools.

>      But surprisingly discovered, that "touch" command has no such option
> available. So I had to go for a script like..
> "find . | touch -am *".

Yes, that is a decent work-around, although it is not quite robust - it 
can run into command line length limitations, and it mistreats spaces in 
file names.  For a truly robust solution, use:

find . -exec touch -am {} +

Besides, we are reluctant to add new features when existing POSIX 
features can already be used to the same effect - as you just proved, 
using find works today on any platform that supports POSIX, whereas if 
you were to rely on your proposed 'touch -R', you would first have to 
check if it has been installed on your machine.

--
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org