hi,
i have many files in a lot of directories and subdirectories where i want to change the time-stamp of files and folders. it works fine with touch for _one_ file, but takes some time for all. i did not find any recursive function for touch. and i have no idea how to write a script for that.
can anyone help?

Like you stated, touch doesn't have a recursive option. This is how I should tackle this:

Touch all files in /home/doe (and all subdirs/files:
$ find /home/doe -exec touch {} \ ;

Touch all files in /home/doe (files only, no dirs):
$ find /home/doe -type f -exec touch {} \ ;

And the other way around (touch only dirs):
$ find /home/doe -type d -exec touch {} \ ;

Hope this helps.

This worked for me. It has to be in your path and executable, and named multitoucher to work properly. To make sure, create a test directory and populate it with test files and directories etc. I can't take any credit for any destructive behavior this script exhibits, as I just spent the last half hour figuring this out for the first time.

marc

OH! Make sure you're in the top directory that you want touched, so if you want to touch all the files and folders in /home/jdoe/touchme/ make sure to cd /home/jdoe/touchme/ before running that script, or else all the files and folders in the directory you're in and all below will be touched.

Nice recursive code

And it will work in a 'true' linux/unix environment. With that I'm trying to say that if you run it and it encounters names with, for example, spaces in them it will fail........

The for X in * is the base for that problem. This File (one file!!) will be broken up and X will be filled first with This and next with File.

Using find is one way of solving this. There must be others (there's the while construct in the back of my mind).

Neither can I

i tried the first option and got a

find: missing argument to `-exec'

after find /home/mandavi/data/ -exec touch {}\ -t 06251436;
but i can't find in the find-manual any need for an extra argument for -exec but the arguments for the executed command.
and i have a lot of "non-unix" file and folder names in the tree...

Thanks!

Are you sure about the spaces? I thought "$X" took care of spaces, or couldn't you also put ${X} ?

I believe I placed a space between the \ and the ;. Sorry about that!

To make sure, checked and changed:

Touch all files in /home/doe (and all subdirs/files:
$ find /home/doe -exec touch {} \;

Touch all files in /home/doe (files only, no dirs):
$ find /home/doe -type f -exec touch {} \;

And the other way around (touch only dirs):
$ find /home/doe -type d -exec touch {} \;

${X} will not work, the "$X" or "${X}" will work in some cases (a real space being one of them). But a space is just one of the 'strange' characters you can encounter.

Odd, I'm playing with spaces, &, %, even * in file and directory names, and no errors. I don't know why this works for me, as I'm still a novice at bash scripting.

it worked! thanks a lot

If you have file names that contain white-space or evil characters, place the brackets inside of double quotes.

find /home/doe -exec touch "{}" \;

find /usr/src/linux -exec touch {} \; does not work for me...

But this one did

find /usr/src/linux * -exec touch {} \;

Note the *.

Without the -exec option, find /usr/src/linux would only output /usr/src/linux. Including the * would display all the files inside /usr/src/linux, which is what you want.