Programmer Humor

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Touch a file in Linux (programming.dev)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (4 children)

I'm betting that's why none ever materialized. Most tools that can manipulate a file, can also create that file first, so there's just never been a usecase.

Right-clicking the desktop to create a new txt file in Windows feels so natural, but I can't really think of any time you'd want to create a new file and do nothing with it in a CLI.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (3 children)

You might if some other program checks whether that file exists and behaves differently depending on that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (2 children)

But even still, what's a realistic usecase that would that involve needing a blank, unmodified file in that instance?

[–] indepndnt 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

One use case is if you're running a web server that is configured to return a "maintenance" page instead of the live site if a particular file exists. Which is actually pretty cool because then you don't have to update the config when you need to do something or let your users get a bunch of 502 errors, you just touch maintenance and you're good.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

That's a good one!