Paul Eggert wrote:
L A Walsh wrote:
You run "touch -". Whatever file stdout happens to be associated
with, gets touched. It's the same idea as "cat -", except with stdout
rather than stdin.
The difference between that and updating due to write activity being
mostly that ctime is also written?
No, that's not a difference. Try running 'touch foo; strace touch foo;
strace touch - >>foo'. I did that, and saw the same system call being
used to alter foo's last-modified time, in both strace outputs.
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So the touch command does the same as:
echo -n >>'stdout-file' ?
What was the use-case that touch needed to have
the new feature?
*curious sort*