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touch filename

Change the date/time stamp of the file filename to the current time. Create an empty file if the file does not exist.  You can change the stamp to any date using touch -t 200201311759.30 (year 2002 January day 31 time 17:59:30).

There are three date/time values associated with every file on an ext2 filesystem:
- the time of last access to the file (atime)
- the time of last modification to the file (mtime)
- the time of last change to the file's inode (ctime).
Touch will change the first two to the value specified, and the last one always to the current system time. They can all be read using the stat command (see the next entry).

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