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Touch all files and subdirectories (recursive touch)

 
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# 1  
Old 04-30-2009
Touch all files and subdirectories (recursive touch)
I have a folder with many subdirectories and i need to set the modified date to today for everything in it. Please help, thanks!

I tried something i found online, find . -print0 | xargs -r0 touch

but I got the error: xargs: illegal option -- r
# 2  
Old 04-30-2009
man xargs
man find, look for -exec
# 3  
Old 04-30-2009
Pludi, the idea is to help.... not refer someone to the man page.

Code:
find . -exec touch {} \;

This User Gave Thanks to quirkasaurus For This Post:
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# 4  
Old 04-30-2009
Thank you so much quirkasaurus!
# 5  
Old 05-01-2009
Would you mind explaining it a little? I never saw a backslash used in unix before, what does it do? I will research on my own, but i would like to know.
# 6  
Old 05-01-2009
The sem-colon is a command terminus in the UNIX shell.
However, it is required to be passed into the find command
as a terminus for the -exec option.

If it is not escaped by the backslash, the find command fails.
try typing:

echo ;

and

echo \;

to see the difference.
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