How to `touch` files recursively?

Question

I need to change the timestamp of about 5000 files.

Typing touch file1.txt, touch file2.txt will take me forever.

Is there a way to do something in the lines of touch -R *?

You didn't specify which shell you are using, but with zsh, touch **/* is convenient. — Marc Glisse, Feb 1, 2015 at 22:36
@Marc Glisse Keep in mind that the argument list easily gets too long. — user986805, Oct 8, 2019 at 7:11
In bash you need to set globstar before you can use touch ** — user986805, Oct 8, 2019 at 7:33

Melebius · Accepted Answer · 2019-10-08 05:48:43Z

130

You can use find command to find all your files and execute touch on every found file using -exec

find . -type f -exec touch {} +

If you want to filter your result only for text files, you can use

find . -type f -name "*.txt" -exec touch {} +

Melebius

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answered Feb 1, 2015 at 9:46

g_p

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I'd suggest using -exec's + terminator (instead of \;). This will chain multiple arguments onto each touch instance (up to the system argument limit) and will therefore fork out much less (and probably be faster).
– Oli ♦
Feb 1, 2015 at 9:53
6

@g_p ... and for a source see What is the difference between using '+' and '\;' in -exec command?
– αғsнιη
Feb 1, 2015 at 16:21
5

And for a dry run, just leave out the -exec touch {} + part, and it'll print to your terminal what it would have affected.
– Alex
Feb 1, 2015 at 20:11
7

Thanks, Although I think 'find' is missing his first parameter. find . -type f -exec touch {} +
– giltsl
Mar 22, 2018 at 9:17
4

It's worth noting that the man page (Ubuntu 19.10) for find suggests it is more secure to use -execdir rather than -exec as -execdir runs each command from the directory in which the find result is located. It also says that when invoked from a shell, "[the curly brace pair] should be quoted (for example, '{}') to protect it from interpretation by shells".
– Bob Sammers
Jan 24, 2020 at 21:55

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