Execution order of touch command arguments

Question

I have a list of files that are space separated and I want to use the touch command to update their timestamps in that order. But when I supply the filenames as arguments, the timestamps get updated in a different order.

touch 1.txt 2.txt 3.txt 4.txt 5.txt 6.txt 7.txt 8.txt 9.txt 10.txt 11.txt 12.txt 

After running the command above and running ls -t (sorting by time modified) I get the following:

1.txt 10.txt 11.txt 12.txt 2.txt 3.txt 4.txt 5.txt 6.txt 7.txt 8.txt 9.txt

Does supplying arguments to commands not guarantee the execution order? If not, how can I update the timestamps of those files in that specific order?

Answer 1

With no time specified, touch changes the timestamps of all its arguments to the current time at the time each file is touched, which should produce a different timestamp for each file, but in many cases this ends up applying the same timestamp to all its arguments; you can verify this by running stat on all the touched files. They are processed in the order specified on the command line.

To get the result you want, you need to loop and touch each file individually, with some delay:

for file in {1..12}.txt; do touch $file; sleep 0.1; done

(with more or less delay depending on the timestamp resolution of the underlying file system).

Note that ls -t lists files sorted by descending timestamp; to see increasing times you need to use ls -rt.

Answer 2

Maybe it's a little cumbersome, but if it's in a script, I would use a for loop.

ex:

for x in 1.txt 2.txt 3.txt 4.txt [as many as you want here]; do touch $x; done

This would result in them always being created in the order given. You of course can change the names to be whatever and not follow any sort of pattern. If you are creating files with the same name or a numeric pattern like in your example, I would do this:

for x in $(seq 1 10); do touch $x.txt; done