touch with DOS commands


I often use Cygwin to get access to a few linux style commands that I need. The command touch is one of those commands. In case your not familiar with it it will create/update the creation and modification times of a file to the current time. If the file specified does not exist it will also create an empty file.

The problem I recently encountered though was I needed the touch functionality but on a computer that did not have Cygwin installed. Of course I could have just put together a quick little C# or Java program to do the trick but I still would have to install the app onto this other computer.

The solution to this delimia was to use the following dos command which will create an empty file:
copy /y nul file.txt



This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 at 10:49 pm and is filed under DOS/Shell. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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7 Responses to “touch with DOS commands”

  1. errr
    errr Says:
    February 12th, 2008 at 12:46 pm

    That seems to clear(!!) the file, rather than touching it

  2. Brett Batie
    Brett Says:
    February 12th, 2008 at 3:02 pm

    You are right! I have only used that command to quickly create an empty file. I have never used it for updating the modification time of an existing file.

    I do not know of a way to modify the date modified of a file in dos without using a third party program. Although, if you want the date modified to be updated to the current time you could use one of the follow commands:

    1. This copies the file to a temp File and then copies the temp File back over the original. Then deletes the temp File.
    type file.txt > tmpFile.txt | type tmpFile.txt > file.txt | del tmpFile.txt

    2. Type: edit file.txt, then hit: alt, f, s, alt, f, x

    I really think both solutions are hacks at best. I also wonder what would happen to unicode files or files that have unix style line endings.

  3. masc
    masc Says:
    February 17th, 2008 at 2:24 pm

    @copy nul: /b +%1 tmp.$$$
    @move tmp.$$$ %1

    =touch.bat
    doesn’t change anything in file.org, only time and date

  4. masc
    masc Says:
    February 17th, 2008 at 3:24 pm

    @copy %1 + nul %1 /by

    also works, provided copy is new enough to test that it shouldn’t overwrite the original file

  5. dolphin
    dolphin Says:
    September 26th, 2008 at 9:02 am

    @COPY /B %1 +,,

    I found that command on the following page:
    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/69581

  6. Simone
    Simone Says:
    October 3rd, 2008 at 7:36 am

    type nul >> “c:\file.txt”

  7. dangerOp
    dangerOp Says:
    April 21st, 2009 at 2:18 pm

    There are two parts to the behavior of ‘touch’:

    1) if the file doesn’t exist, create it (which also sets the current date/time)
    2) if the file does exist, update the date and time

    In both cases, nothing is added or removed from the contents of the file (the first case starts with an empty file).

    The use of copy will fail for the first case, and the use of just ‘type nul >> foo’ will not work for the second case. You will have to combine both of these approaches:

    touch.bat:
    ==============
    @echo off
    type nul >> %1
    copy /b %1 +,,

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