“Do one thing and do it very well” is the UNIX philosophy after all; if you’re 99% likely to just create that missing file after you get a file not found error, why should touch waste your time?

[–] 0x0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 35 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Because now touch does two things.

Without touch, we could "just" use the shell to create files.

: > foo.txt

[–] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 21 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Touch does one thing from a “contract” perspective:

Ensure the timestamp of is

[–] dan@upvote.au 15 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Systemd also does one thing from a contract perspective: run your system

[–] emptiestplace@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago

Oh no.

[–] dukk@programming.dev 1 points 2 years ago

Does it do it well, though?

[–] Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

But this directly goes against that philosophy, since now instead of changing timestamps it's also creating files

[–] kautau@lemmy.world 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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