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