Recently I was asked, in a job interview, "how to create a zero size file [I think that means an empty file] in all the folders of the file system?"
I found the question a bit strange, I thought of a loop to list all the directory and use touch or maybe go to the root directory and use touch with a recursive option. Do you have any ideas?
That could be ...
find . -type d -exec touch {}/emptyfile ;
-type d means "directories"execute the command touch and create a file named "emptyfile"{} substitutes what is found as a result from find. The / is to make it a valid path+filenane and the escaped ; is to close the command (otherwise it becomes "emptyfile;")result ...
rinzwind@schijfwereld:~/t$ mkdir 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
rinzwind@schijfwereld:~/t$ ls -ltr */*
ls: cannot access '*/*': No such file or directory
rinzwind@schijfwereld:~/t$ find . -type d -exec touch {}/emptyfile ;
rinzwind@schijfwereld:~/t$ ls -ltr */*
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rinzwind rinzwind 0 apr 16 19:57 5/emptyfile
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rinzwind rinzwind 0 apr 16 19:57 9/emptyfile
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rinzwind rinzwind 0 apr 16 19:57 1/emptyfile
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rinzwind rinzwind 0 apr 16 19:57 8/emptyfile
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rinzwind rinzwind 0 apr 16 19:57 3/emptyfile
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rinzwind rinzwind 0 apr 16 19:57 2/emptyfile
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rinzwind rinzwind 0 apr 16 19:57 10/emptyfile
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rinzwind rinzwind 0 apr 16 19:57 7/emptyfile
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rinzwind rinzwind 0 apr 16 19:57 6/emptyfile
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rinzwind rinzwind 0 apr 16 19:57 4/emptyfile
Mine works but the answer from Peter Cordes is better :)
