Small, Sharp Software Tools

Creating 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, ...