[Opening up a new bug report number for this, in reply to a message
involving Bug#79907.]
On 2025-12-01 00:25, Stan Marsh wrote:
I've often wished that "touch" had an option like -c, but the opposite
- that is, *always* create (and generate an error if the file already
exists) (*).
What use cases would there be for -c?
NetBSD "touch" has these options:
-D Don't change a file's times if they're already OK.
-R FILE Like -r FILE, but don't follow symlinks.
I.e., NetBSD -h affects only whether symlinks are followed in the target
file, not in the reference file. This is incompatible with GNU touch.
For example, with NetBSD:
touch -Dhr SYMLINK SYMLINK
updates SYMLINK's timestamp to be that of the file it references; there
is no easy way to do that with GNU touch. Perhaps we should change GNU
touch to be compatible with NetBSD in this respect.
FreeBSD "touch" has this option:
-A [-][[HH]MM]SS]
Adjust the access and modification times by HH:MM:SS.
This implies -c.
This is for when you have a bunch of files with wrong timestamps (e.g.,
you imported them from MS-DOS and they had the wrong timezone). This
might be a useful flag to add to GNU "touch".
