Timeline for Why is the Unix command "touch" called touch? How is it related to new/create or update?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
23 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 days ago | comment | added | Nate Eldredge | @Peter-ReinstateMonica: To be pedantic, unzip doesn't fit with the others. PKZIP came from outside the Unix world and not until 1989, it seems. gzip was 1992. Prior to that, the common Unix compression utility was just called compress. | |
| Jun 16 at 2:32 | vote | accept | da_miao_zi | ||
| Jun 14 at 14:36 | comment | added | Michael Harvey | @Peter-ReinstateMonica - I force all mine to wear gloves when they are not active. | |
| Jun 13 at 23:58 | answer | added | dave | timeline score: 5 | |
| Jun 13 at 13:15 | comment | added | John Doty | I can only add that as a native English speaker, the name of the command made perfect intuitive sense to me when I first encountered it. Over four decades ago, yikes ツ | |
| S Jun 13 at 13:06 | history | edited | Stephen Kitt | CC BY-SA 4.0 | Link to Wikiquote instead of Google Books (the latter doesn’t work in many geos). |
| S Jun 13 at 13:06 | history | suggested | Peter - Reinstate Monica | CC BY-SA 4.0 | Link to Ken Thompson quote regarding "creat" |
| Jun 12 at 11:45 | comment | added | Peter - Reinstate Monica | And then there is the question that can trouble innocent minds: Can a shell script touch itself?? | |
| Jun 12 at 11:41 | comment | added | Peter - Reinstate Monica | Well, it's clearly the work of the same mind that named "finger", "unzip", "strip", "mount" and "unmount"! Ah yes, and "grep" and "fsck". | |
| Jun 12 at 11:40 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Jun 13 at 13:06 | |||||
| Jun 12 at 7:54 | comment | added | Tommylee2k | that file wasn't touched in weeks, is it still up-to-date? maybe just english language inspired | |
| Jun 12 at 3:12 | answer | added | Mark Foskey | timeline score: 8 | |
| Jun 12 at 3:03 | comment | added | da_miao_zi | It’s kind of amusing that in the final lines of Unix V7’s touch.c, you’ll find a label named create—spelled correctly—right next to the system call creat, which famously drops the “e”. @zdimension | |
| Jun 11 at 21:15 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| Jun 12 at 9:34 | |||||
| Jun 11 at 20:48 | history | edited | Raffzahn | CC BY-SA 4.0 | Titles do not allow formating code. |
| Jun 11 at 18:23 | answer | added | Raffzahn | timeline score: 7 | |
| Jun 11 at 18:23 | comment | added | zdimension | As a small aside, note that creat is not a misspelling per se, but a consequence of the behavior of some linkers from back then (names could only go up to 6 characters including a prefixing underscore, hence 5 characters for creat): unix.stackexchange.com/questions/10893/… | |
| Jun 11 at 17:18 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Jun 11 at 12:04 | comment | added | user3840170 | You’re overthinking this – “touch” just refers to the everyday meaning of the word, as in handle, but not substantially change. | |
| Jun 11 at 11:52 | comment | added | dave | In the painting, the 'touch' is surely an update - the body had been created, and then the touch imbued it with life. | |
| Jun 11 at 11:50 | answer | added | Sotto Voce | timeline score: 16 | |
| Jun 11 at 10:17 | answer | added | Stephen Kitt | timeline score: 48 | |
| Jun 11 at 9:10 | history | asked | da_miao_zi | CC BY-SA 4.0 |