bug#7008: On "touch" command

[Eric Blake]

On 09/10/2010 08:47 AM, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 09/10/2010 03:30 AM, Dibyajyoti Ghosh wrote:
> > Hi,
> > I needed to change the timestamp of a directory structure of very high
> > depth. and in each level there are lots of files and folders.
> > So I expected a recursive operation of "touch" (like -R in chmod or in
> > chown
> > etc.).
>
> Thanks for the report. However, we are reluctant to bloat any more tools
> with recursive traversal than absolutely necessary - the whole Unix
> philosophy is that each tool should do one thing well, rather than
> making every tool copy common actions from other tools.

For the record, on of the reasons that ls and du must support recursion 
is that they must list totals, where the use of find|xargs might cause 
multiple tool invocations which end up breaking reporting of totals. 
Tools like chmod, chown, rm, and mv must support recursion because there 
are some particular end-result ownership and permissions which require 
intermediate settings to still allow safe recursion, but there is no way 
to express temporary ownerships needed only for the duration of the 
recursion when using find|xargs.  Besides, all of the above-named tools 
have recursion required by POSIX.

But for touch, which neither outputs a total message, nor changes file 
meta-data in a manner that would affect recursion, nor has a POSIX 
mandate to support recursion, the use of find -exec touch (or 
find|xargs) is preferable.

And for other tools that must report totals, like wc, we still don't 
want to add recursion - it is easier to have wc support arbitrarily long 
lists of safe file names via 'find -print0 | wc --files0-from=-' than to 
make wc recursive.

--
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org