Re: touch request for --verbose option

[Eric Blake]

On 03/29/2017 09:12 PM, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> On 29/03/17 06:47, Nellis, Kenneth (Conduent) wrote:
>> Wondering if there's any support to add a -v, --verbose
>> option to touch. When I'm doing non-trivial file management
>> with utilities, e.g., rm, rmdir, mv, cp, rename, touch, I 
>> typically use -v, but touch doesn't offer -v, which I find
>> distracting and annoying.
> 
> This was previous discussed at:
> https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/rejected_requests.html#touch

What are you hoping to be printed? Just the names of the files touched
(already doable by echoing to see what command line you would otherwise
be using)?  A notice whether files were created (as mentioned in the
link above, that's a bit racy, and still somewhat can already be done
with existing tools).

Or are you hoping for more, such as what timestamp was requested, and/or
what actual (courser-resolution) timestamp was actually applied?  _That_
might be useful information, especially in the face of touch --reference.

Also, now that we have 'date --debug', and 'touch -d' uses the same date
parser engine, I wonder if we should add a 'touch --debug -d' option
that uses the same date debugging code?  Again, particularly true since
we allow 'touch --reference -d $relative', as a cool feature that date
alone cannot yet do.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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