Thanks for taking the time to review my patch. I agree with you that this change is not strictly required. It's more of a nice to have / ergonomic improvement to the existing touch interface.
There are several StackOverflow posts that ask for this very feature: https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/63098 & https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/305844 Below is the help text for touch: > Update the access and modification times of each FILE to the current time. > A FILE argument that does not exist is created empty, unless -c or -h is supplied. I was surprised to learn there was no existing flag that would allow directory creation when a file and its directories do not exist. Currently if directories do not exist, the command fails. I would go as far to argue that creating a file also implies creating any required directories, since directories must exist before we can create said file. I also agree with David Hilton's recommendation that we should not change the default behavior of touch, like in my first patch, but rather add an opt-in flag for this behavior. Thank you for reading my reply and I look forward to your future feedback. On Tue, Jun 14, 2022 at 10:37 PM Paul Eggert <egg...@cs.ucla.edu> wrote: > On 6/14/22 19:20, Alan Rosenthal wrote: > > `touch -p a/b/c/d/e` will now be the same as running: > > `mkdir -p a/b/c/d && touch a/b/c/d/e`. > > I don't see how this useful enough to merit a change, since one can > achieve the effect of the proposed "touch -p" with the already-existing > "mkdir -p" followed by plain "touch". mkdir -p already exists and should > work everywhere that's POSIX-compatible. We don't need -p for other > commands that create files (e.g., cp, mv, ln); what's special about > 'touch'? > >
