TOUCH(1L)

NAME
touch - change file timestamps

SYNOPSIS
touch [-acm] [-r reference-file] [-t MMDDhhmm[[CC]YY][.ss]] [-d time] [--time={atime,access,use,mtime,modify}] [--date=time] [--file=reference-file] [--no-create] file...

DESCRIPTION
This manual page documents the GNU version of touch. touch changes the access and modification times of each given file to the current time. Files that do not exist are created empty. If the first file name given would be a valid argument to the -t option and no timestamp is given with any of the -d, -r, or -t options and the -- argument is not given, that argument is interpreted as the time for the other files instead of as a filename.

  OPTIONS

-a, --time=atime, --time=access, --time=use
    Change the access time only.

-c, --no-create
    Do not create files that do not exist.

-d, --date time
    Use time (which can be in various common formats) instead of the current time. It can contain month names, timezones, `am' and `pm', etc.

-m, --time=mtime, --time=modify
    Change the modification time only.

-r, --file reference-file
    Use the times of reference-file instead of the current time.

-t MMDDhhmm[[CC]YY][.ss]
    Use the argument (months, days, hours, minutes, optional century and years, optional seconds) instead of the current time.

The long-named options can be introduced with `+' as well as `--', for compatibility with previous releases. Eventually support for `+' will be removed, because it is incompatible with the POSIX.2 standard.