[This is more of a feature request than a bug request. But I don't see where I can make feature requests.]
It would be nice if touch had an option to only "touch" if the file doesn't already exist. Sort of like -c, but the other way around. This is useful because often, the reason one is using "touch" in a script is because one wants to make sure that a file exists before doing an operation that expects the file to already exist. But if the file already exists, then touch has a side effect of changing the mtime or the atime. [On many systems, one can work on a file without changing the atime thanks to mount options such as noatime or relatime.] It's easy enough to wrap touch in an if: if [ ! -e $file ]; then touch $file; fi But it would be nicer if this common case were built in. I would suggest -e, for exists. Thanks! - Morty
