How can I change the creation time of all a folder's files to the current time?

Question

Under a Linux shell, how can I change the creation time of all a folder's files to the current time?

Answer 1

Navigate to the folder in question, let's say, ~/Documents/myfiles.

$ cd ~/Documents/myfiles

Then do:

$ touch *

This will change the modification time to whenever you executed that command.

Obviously you can make this more specific depending on your use case, e.g.

$ touch *.doc

will only alter the modification time for files with the string '.doc' in their name.

Answer 2

In Linux, if you want to do some thing recursively in directory, or you want to apply some actions on files meeting some criterions，you should try find and xargs

Touch all files in ~/Documents/myfiles (including files in sub directory)

find ~/Documents/myfiles -type f -print0 | xargs -0 touch