this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
1170 points (97.5% liked)

Programmer Humor

19551 readers
1067 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Feyter@programming.dev
anzo@programming.dev
BurningTurtle@programming.dev
pylapp@programming.dev
1170
Touch a file in Linux (programming.dev)
submitted 8 months ago by chraebsli@programming.dev to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
94 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] kautau@lemmy.world 10 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

You can pass -c to not create a file, but it does go against the philosophy that it creates them by default instead of that being an option

EDIT: Looking closer into the code, it would appear to maybe be an efficiency thing based on underlying system calls

Without that check, touch just opens a file for writing, with no other filesystem check, and closes it

With that check, touch first checks if the file exists, and then if so opens the file for writing