Creating a File Of course, the easiest way to create a file is to use a word processor like vi or emacs. However, there are a few utilities which you can use to create files from the command line as well. The "touch" Utility The touch utility simply creates an empty file of a given name using the syntax: touch filename

As you can see from the example above, if the file already exists, it will modify the access time without changing the contents of the file. The touch utility offers the following options touch [options] MMDDhhmmYY filelist Option Explanation -a Specifies the access time -c Instructs touch to not create a file not specified in the list -m Specifies the modify time MMDDhhmmYY The time and date for setting files filelist Space delimited list of files to apply time to. Using Redirection A more useful tool for creating files from the command line is redirection. Typically, you will use redirection to save the output of a command in the body of a file. for example, check out how we use redirection in the following example to crate a file with the directory listing. Previous | Next | Table of Contents