bug#9742: touch option for existence? (original) (raw)

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From: Morty
Subject: bug#9742: touch option for existence?
Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2011 21:45:25 -0400
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-06-14)

[This is more of a feature request than a bug request. But I don't see where I can make feature requests.]

It would be nice if touch had an option to only "touch" if the file doesn't already exist. Sort of like -c, but the other way around. This is useful because often, the reason one is using "touch" in a script is because one wants to make sure that a file exists before doing an operation that expects the file to already exist. But if the file already exists, then touch has a side effect of changing the mtime or the atime. [On many systems, one can work on a file without changing the atime thanks to mount options such as noatime or relatime.]

It's easy enough to wrap touch in an if:

if [ ! -e file];thentouchfile ]; then touch file];thentouchfile; fi

But it would be nicer if this common case were built in. I would suggest -e, for exists. Thanks!