RTouch - File Touch Utility

RTouch.zip - Touch utility supporting recursion, wildcards for filenames and the option to open files read-only instead of write.

License: This utility may be freely used so long as it is unmodified, not sold or redistributed.. 

Why write yet another touch utility?

In Application Virtualization, files are often populated onto an execution machine only when accessed and "accessed" is defined as when opened.  If you want to control when a file will be transferred into an execution machine, you need the abilty to force an open to occur - and you want that open to be read-only.  

Most "touch" utilities adjust the file modification date and time when they run and this is a "write" operation which makes the file "different" from the original, even if only different by date.  For virtualized execution, this can have negative effects of promoting the file into a per-user level of isolation as the file is "different" than the base.  

This touch utility also runs by adjusting file modification date in its default execution, but with the -r switch can be told to issue a read-only open against the file rather than a "write" of the file modification time as is normal for "touch".  This read-only open will be enough to cause "cache fills" to occur or to otherwise force the file into local space, but it will not "change" the file.

I searched the internet and couldn't find a utility that met this read-only need, so wrote one.  

If you find it useful, please send a post card from an interesting place.

For comments or feedback, send email to "joe" at this domain.

Joe Nord