bug#47014: Design flaw: incompatible touch '-f' gnu-option causes loss of (meta)data by default

[Paul Eggert]

On 3/8/21 5:50 PM, L A Walsh wrote:

> Data loss shown in original bug submission.  As mentioned/documented
> it was use of:
> 'touch -f <from filename> <destination filename>'

Sure, but what was the context of that command? Was it part of a shell 
script? What was the script for? Can we see a copy? That sort of thing.


> I don't know which version of touch I remember it from as I've
> use a few versions of unix, as in (scratching memory):
> some form of SCO Unix on Intel chips (early 80's, pre IBM-PC), HPUX, Sun 
> Unix(a BSD variant), SunOS (a SysV variant), IRIX(sgi),
> among others whose names I don't remember.

It'd be helpful to nail that down.

On FreeBSD, touch's -f option is also a no-op, and I observe similar 
behavior on Solaris 10 (where I lack the source code). So there are good 
compatibility arguments for leaving things the way they are.