To create an empty file, use the 'touch' cmd

touch .new_account

http://www.kholix.com/wiki/index.php...shell_commands
The rute link above is good, also http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

Thanks for your reply! I used touch to create a file, but I am trying to create LOTS of the same empty files in lots of directories, so I tried:

touch /home/*/public_html/ .new-account

but it didnt spit out an error message, or create the files. Any ideas?

It looks like you have put a space between the path and the file name, so you have simply touched (changed the timestamp) of all the public_html directories in every user's home and created a file .new_account in the current directory. Anyway, if you do:
you get an error because the shell is confused if she tries to expand to non existent file names. So again keep it simple and use a loop:

Thanks AGAIN! That worked. (More cold beer en route!) Oddly though, when I run the earlier command you supplied:

while read name
do
dir=$(dirname "$name")
echo mv "$name" "$dir/.new-user"
done < <(ls /home/*/.new-account)

It doesn't show the newly created files, which seems pretty weird. The only difference I see it that the ones that were created by:

for dir in /home/*/public_html
do
touch $dir/.new_account
done

are owned by root:root , whereas the previous ones were owned but the user:user. Why will

while read name
do
dir=$(dirname "$name")
echo mv "$name" "$dir/.new-user"
done < <(ls /home/*/.new-account)

not detect the root owned .new-account files?