How do I recursively touch files matching a pattern

Question

Within my ~/docs directory, I want to "touch" all files ending with .txt

How can I do this?

Answer 1

With find:

find ~/docs -name "*.txt" -exec touch {} \;

• You search in ~/docs
• The name option will match all txt files - exec will execute the command touch on the file name, which is substituted in {}
• \; ends the command and touch will be called once for each file found

Note:

• A slight variation, \+ at the end constructs one single command to run touch on all of these files at once. This is not possible with all commands, but it works for touch and saves you a few calls if you have a lot of files that are affected.