L A Walsh wrote:
You run "touch -". Whatever file stdout happens to be associated with, gets touched. It's the same idea as "cat -", except with stdout rather than stdin.The difference between that and updating due to write activity being mostly that ctime is also written?
No, that's not a difference. Try running 'touch foo; strace touch foo; strace touch - >>foo'. I did that, and saw the same system call being used to alter foo's last-modified time, in both strace outputs.
