How do I recursively touch files matching a pattern

Question

Within my ~/docs directory, I want to "touch" all files ending with .txt

How can I do this?

slhck · Accepted Answer · 2012-06-04T14:45:29.020

20

With find:

find ~/docs -name "*.txt" -exec touch {} \;

You search in ~/docs
The name option will match all txt files - exec will execute the command touch on the file name, which is substituted in {}
\; ends the command and touch will be called once for each file found

Note:

A slight variation, \+ at the end constructs one single command to run touch on all of these files at once. This is not possible with all commands, but it works for touch and saves you a few calls if you have a lot of files that are affected.

edited Jun 04 '12 at 14:45

answered Jun 04 '12 at 11:19

slhck

4

`{} \+` would be better here... `touch` can handle many filenames on its command line, so for example, with 10 thousand files and `{} \;` **10 thousand** calls will be made to `touch`... Using `{} \+` will call `touch` only once (depending on available memory)... Here is an excerpt from *find's* man-page: `-exec command {} + ... The command line is built in much the same way that xargs builds its command lines`. There is more detail in the `man find` documentation. – Peter.O Jun 04 '12 at 14:36
@Peter.O True, just a habit of mine to use the other syntax. – slhck Jun 04 '12 at 14:46
@slhck: And much slower with higher overhead. – Hello71 Jun 04 '12 at 20:49

1 Answers1