A script refreshes the timestamps of log files but must never bring a missing file into existence. Type the short option for touch, including its leading dash, that suppresses the creation of files that do not already exist.

LPIC-1 Exam 101-500, objective 103. GNU and Unix commands medium

Machine-checked — no person has signed for it. This question was read against the source cited below by an automated pass, which found no contradiction. That is a weaker claim than it sounds: the same kind of process wrote the question, so it can confirm its own mistake.

Treat it as a good draft rather than as settled fact, and read the source below before you rely on it. It is not used in mock exams here — only questions a person has signed for are.

How these questions are written — where each question comes from, what the verification ledger records, and what happens when one is found wrong.

Answer

Type the answer.

Accepted answers

Case sensitive — Linux is, and grading LS as ls would teach a falsehood.

Why

touch has two jobs: it sets a file's access and modification times to the current time, and it creates the file as empty if it is absent. -c (--no-create) removes the second job, so a missing operand is skipped silently rather than created. The times can also be given explicitly with -d for a date string or -t for a [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] stamp, and -a or -m restricts the change to one of the two times.

Where this comes from

Cited
manual page touch(1)

Practise this

Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 103 and space the ones you get wrong.

Practise LPIC-1 Exam 101-500

More questions on this objective

All questions on GNU and Unix commands

Practise LPIC-1 Exam 101-500