Mike-Ward.Net

Touch a File in Windows without a Touch Utility

One of those annoying omissions in Windows is the lack of a Touch utility to update the time stamp of a file. There are dozens of freeware programs available to do this but what if you’re updating something on a corporate system where you don’t have such a utility?

Your can do this from a plain old DOS command as follows:

copy /b Source+,,

where Source is the name of a file.

This updates the current time and date of the file without modifying it. Believe it or not, this is documented behavior! (Copy command)