Re: touch transverse all dirs

[Bob Proulx]

> I just noticed that in 4.0, I can no longer do a transerver touch on all
> child directories.  I want to touch a directory and all the files in it and
> in its sub-directories.
> 
> Should it be "touch -R *"  ?
> 
> Is the functionality removed or am i just not getting the right commands?

I don't remember there ever being recursive functionality in 'touch'.
Check out the online standards docs for more information.

  http://www.unix-systems.org/single_unix_specification_v2/xcu/touch.html

In UNIX almost all of the directory traversing operations that you
would ever want are contained in 'find' to be used in conjunction with
other commands.  What you probably want is this.

  find . -print0 | xargs -0 touch

The UNIX paradigm favors small modular programs that work together to
produce more complicated programs, and repeated as needed.

Bob