Subject: Re: bug#7999: [coreutils-8.x] documentation of touch command needs clarification

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 07 Feb 2011 21:37:15 -0800

On 02/07/2011 03:36 PM, Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote:
> Perhaps the coreutils manual page and info documentation could be
> updated to document what that implementation does, and discuss whether
> it agrees or differs from other implementations (and POSIX).

If A and B both exist, then "touch A B" might set A's time stamp
to be earlier than B's, or later than B's, or they might
be set to exactly the same time.  POSIX doesn't say, and I suspect that
for efficiency reasons coreutils's documentation shouldn't say
either (except perhaps to say that it doesn't say :-).

The same thing is true, in general, for other coreutils
applications.  For example, "cat A B" might set A's
last-access time to be less than B's, or greater than B's,
or equal to B's.