Is "touch" command..........

[Kimbler]

Reading posts on customizing SEQ (like blinking circles) individual cpp files I see folks respond with:

touch "altered file"
make
make install


Is touch the single file version of ./configure? Meaning if I alter a single file then touch it, only that file is compiled, saving a ton of compile time?

Thanks in advance.

[Catt]

touch is a unix command, it updates (or creates if it doesn't exist) the file named's time stamp.

Used in this context tells the compiler that this file has changed and should be recompiled.

[Kimbler]

Thanks for the reply.

So touching a file does not remove the requirement of a full recomple? Restating ANY time I alter a file to customize SEQ I must ./configure=full recompile?

[Catt]

oh, one more thing:

man <- the command

is your friend, try:

# <- prompt (just in case)

#man touch

it should explain what touch does for you.


Now, you know where that manual people keep telling you to read is. (RTFM) :p

[Kimbler]

Yep did that already.....

Description: Update the access and modification times of each FILE to current time.

Needless to say there is nothing there indicating how it functions in relation to recompiles.

Thank you for your help.

[Catt]

After you have run make you will find many extra files have been created. If you try to just make again, it will tell you there is nothing to do, i.e. everthing is up to date / nothing changed. Header files are used by source files so make doesn't automagically check them for updates, by touching the source file (updating it's timestamp) the compiler sees that it needs to recompiled, and it uses the current header (which is where the change in question was) file.

This is why there are command like:
# make clean

or

# make -f Makefile.dist

they remove the extra compiled files, so the next build does everything again.

[Dark]

Originally posted by Kimbler
Reading posts on customizing SEQ (like blinking circles) individual cpp files I see folks respond with:

touch "altered file"
make
make install


Is touch the single file version of ./configure? Meaning if I alter a single file then touch it, only that file is compiled, saving a ton of compile time?

Thanks in advance.

Dont know the answer to your question, but i did a touch on the file and then did a make && make install and the spell data started showing up.

[Kimbler]

Thank you for the clear explaination of those commands. Very grateful for the help.

[Kimbler]

Dark, Did you notice if your system did a complete recompile (my system take hour) or did it take just a few mins?

[Dark]

Took about 15 mins on a P3 500 with 512 ram