#397·toaruos

touch(1) is incapable of updating timestamps in general

Author: mknosCreated Feb 24, 2026Updated Mar 24, 2026
LabelsNVFS

Hello,

Other systems (e.g. BSD/OS, Solaris and Linux) allow touch(1) to process a directory argument, but not the ToaruOS version. One example where this might be used is if I have a shell script which archives recently modified directories based on find -type d -mtime xxxx, then I can manually touch a directory to force it to be included in the archive.

$ mkdir x
$ touch x
touch: x: Is a directory