Touch directories recursively

Forum Moderators: bakedjake

Message Too Old, No Replies

Touch directories recursively

RobertRogers

4:40 pm on Oct 15, 2006 (gmt 0)

I need to touch a bunch of directories recursively. All the directories and their files, but I can't find any option in the touch command that allows this.

In the shell I have done
touch /home/abcdefg/*

Which changes the dates on some files but does no go down into sub-directories, which is what I want.

Is there a way to do this that you know of?

Thank you in advance.

RobertRogers

7:19 pm on Oct 15, 2006 (gmt 0)

Is webmaster world only just adsense-ers?

mcavic

12:05 am on Oct 16, 2006 (gmt 0)

find /home/abcdefg/ -exec touch {} \;

The abcdefg directory itself will be included.

jtara

12:40 am on Oct 16, 2006 (gmt 0)

"find" is a fundamental of the Linux command-line toolkit!

So many commands have had a "recursive" option added, that we sometimes forget that find was once the only way to do this.

mcavic

1:27 am on Oct 16, 2006 (gmt 0)

Yes, and find -exec is usually more flexible than the recursive command.

RobertRogers

10:28 pm on Oct 17, 2006 (gmt 0)

Excellent guys, thank you very much :-)

RobertRogers

1:26 pm on Oct 18, 2006 (gmt 0)

So I could do this recursively like:

find /home -exec touch -t 200512163333.33 {} \;

For testing purposes, how could I generate a random number for the date, so that each file has a different random number associated with it?

mcavic

3:17 pm on Oct 18, 2006 (gmt 0)

You'd need an external program to give you a random number in the correct valid date format, then do something like:

find /home -exec touch -t `random` {} \;

It's not necessary to do that to test find, though. Just touch them all with the same date, then if they all have the new date, it worked.