touch

Shell (~bash) - Windows/OS X/Linux

Occasionally (okay, at least once a day) I find myself needing to create an empty file. Sometimes it’s to make sure I have write permissions in a particular directory, other times I want to create the file and then edit it in vim.

It’s easy enough to right click in the folder and click create new file, but if you’re already in the shell (and why aren’t you?), just try this command.

touch path/to/the/file/you/want/to/create

The touch command creates an empty file. If the file already exists, it update the modified timestamp in the filesystem for that file.