Windows version of the Unix touch command

Question

I'm looking for a Windows port of the UNIX touch command. I don't want to install an entire MKS toolkit just for the one tool. Is there a native port available somewhere or a command in Windows that does the same thing and supports features like all files in a directory by wildcard?

Specifically I'm after changing mtime, ctime and atime for a project that reports ages of files based on... mtime, ctime and atime.

Answer 1

I've used and recommend unxutils which are native Win32 ports of lots of common Unix utilities. There is a touch command in there.

Answer 2

Native win32 ports of many unix commands, including touch.

I've used it before and it works well - no installation, no DLLs, etc

Answer 3

@Greg: @Adam: Thanks guys, I was also looking for the touch utility, but after some unsuccessfull searches we wrote our own. :-) I will definitely have a look on unxutils.

Answer 4

cygwin comes with touch. I know you mentioned that you don't want to install a whole framework, but cygwin is quite lightweight, and can be called from dos command window without the whole unix-like command line turned on.

You can also control what tools to install, so you could simply install the touch.exe file, and leave the rest of the framework.

Answer 5

The GnuWin32 project has Windows ports of the Gnu versions of the Unix command line utilities.

It comes as a number of separate packages and you can install just the commands you need with no other dependencies. For touch you would need the CoreUtils package.

Answer 6

Try this one from CodeProject.

• No need to install.
• If you want, you can even modify the source.

Answer 7

If you want to touch the date stamp of a file using windows, use the following command at the command prompt:

copy /b filename.ext +,,

(where filename.ext is your files name)

Answer 8

I found a quick way to do it if you have vim installed (not great for big files, will open entire file then close it...)

vim foobar.txt +wq!

The "+" sets argument to run the following commands. "wq!" is "write, quite, force". This will open file, do a save, then close it immediately afterward.

Answer 9

Hey Jason,

Your answer seems to be doing a trick. Thanks :)

But ideally it would NOT be as effective as 'touch'. Is nt it?

Answer 10

@dash-tom-bang:

Here is MSDN's explanation of the mysterious '+' and commas:

copy /b Source+,,

The commas indicate the omission of the Destination parameter.

The copy command supports merging multiple files into a single destination file. Since a blank destination cannot be specified using a space character at the command prompt, two commas can be used to denote that.

And this is MSDN's copy command reference: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490886.aspx

Answer 11

how about this

echo "" > file

Answer 12

copy NUL YourFile.txt

Answer 13

Hi,

I just published my implementation of touch for Win32 at http://www.touchdotexe.com

It's free and open source. It supports all options listed in the POSIX:2008 spec but I also added extra touches like Unicode support, a recursive mode and a verbose mode and even pause on exit for running without cmd.exe. It also lets you change files creation time.

Let me know what you think, my contact info is on the touch.exe website.

Answer 14

Try

fsutil file createnew new.txt 0