Quick question: recursive touch?
Charles G Waldman
cgw at fnal.gov
Wed Oct 6 09:03:37 EDT 1999
Malcolm Tredinnick writes:
> On Tue, Oct 05, 1999 at 09:21:28PM +0000, Blake Winton wrote:
> > On Tue, 05 Oct 1999 20:51:25 GMT, Preston Landers wrote:
> [ ...random deletions... ]
>
> > >> 'open(file,"w")' will cause the file to become zero bytes long.
> > >
> > >Isn't that what touch does?
> >
> > Nope. touch only changes the time if the file already exists...
>
> I guess it depends on the version of touch you are using. By default,
> the GNU version *does* create a file of zero length if it doesn't
> previously exist. This is a documented faeture. If you don't want this
> to happen, you must pass the -c or --no-create option.
That wasn't the point; the problem with the posted Python code was
that if the file *did* exist, it would be truncated, losing any
existing data.
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