utility - Implement touch using Python?

Question

touch is a Unix utility that sets the modification and access times of files to the current time of day. If the file doesn't exist, it is created with default permissions.

How would you implement it as a Python function? Try to be cross platform and complete.

(Current Google results for "python touch file" are not that great, but point to os.utime.)

Answer 1

Looks like this is new as of Python 3.4 - pathlib.

from pathlib import Path

Path('path/to/file.txt').touch()

This will create a file.txt at the path.

--

Path.touch(mode=0o777, exist_ok=True)

Create a file at this given path. If mode is given, it is combined with the process’ umask value to determine the file mode and access flags. If the file already exists, the function succeeds if exist_ok is true (and its modification time is updated to the current time), otherwise FileExistsError is raised.