touch

A Go implementation of the GNU touch utility

touch is a command-line tool that changes the access and/or modification times of the specified files. If a file does not exist, it is created empty unless the --no-create flag is specified. It mimics the behavior of the GNU touch utility, with support for various timestamp sources like reference files, POSIX stamps, or date strings.

Features

• Create new files or update timestamps of existing files.
• Support for GNU-compatible flags and options, including --access, --modification, --date, --reference, --stamp, and more.
• Modular design with separate packages for CLI handling (Cobra), core logic, filesystem interactions, timestamp parsing, and platform-specific functionality.
• Comprehensive unit tests for CLI logic, timestamp calculation, and filesystem operations.
• Cross-platform compatibility, with notes for Windows-specific limitations (e.g., --no-dereference is unsupported on Windows).

Installation

Install touch using Go:

go install github.com/nicholas-fedor/touch@latest

This places the touch binary in your $GOPATH/bin (e.g., ~/go/bin/).

Usage

Basic Usage

Create or update a file with current time:

touch file.txt

Flags

Flag	Description
-a, --access	Change only the access time.
-m, --modification	Change only the modification time.
--time string	Change the specified time: access, atime, use (like -a); modify, mtime (like -m).
-c, --no-create	Do not create any files.
-h, --no-dereference	Affect each symbolic link instead of any referenced file (unsupported on Windows).
--f	(Ignored for compatibility with GNU touch).
-r, --reference string	Use this file's times instead of current time.
-t, --stamp string	Use [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] instead of current time.
-d, --date string	Parse ARG and use it instead of current time.
-v, --version	Output version information and exit.
--help	Show help message.

Examples

• Change only access time:

touch -a file.txt

• Set a specific date and time:

touch -d "2025-07-13 14:30" file.txt

• Use times from a reference file:

touch -r ref.txt file.txt

• POSIX stamp format:

touch -t 2507131430 file.txt

• Obsolete usage (treated as POSIX stamp):

touch 2507131430 file.txt

For more details, run --help or see the GNU touch manual.

Building from Source

Clone the repository and build:

git clone https://github.com/nicholas-fedor/touch.git
cd touch
go build -o touch ./cmd

Run locally:

./touch

Requirements

• Go 1.22 or later (for module support).

License

This project is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 — see the LICENSE file for details.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please submit issues or pull requests on GitHub.

Make sure to run tests before submitting:

go test ./...

Logo

Special thanks to Maria Letta for providing an awesome collection of Go gophers.