WinTouch is a Windows-native touch.exe for creating files and controlling file timestamps from CMD.

It is inspired by BSD touch, but it is not a POSIX compatibility shim. WinTouch is built around Windows filesystem behavior and treats the three Windows-visible timestamps as first-class fields:

• Created
• Modified
• Accessed

Classic touch is mainly used to create files and update file times. WinTouch keeps that core behavior, then extends it for Windows-native scripting, testing, metadata repair, and batch timestamp control.

• Creates empty files when they do not exist.
• Updates timestamps on existing files.
• Defaults to updating Created, Modified, and Accessed.
• Selects individual timestamps with -a, -m, and -c.
• Sets exact readable dates with -d <DATE>.
• Sets BSD compact timestamps with -t <TIMESTAMP>.
• Synchronizes timestamps from another file with -s / --sync <FILE>.
• Applies relative timestamp offsets with -e / --edit <OFFSET>.

• Created timestamp support
  Windows exposes file creation time as a normal visible timestamp. WinTouch makes Created as scriptable as Modified and Accessed.

• All-three timestamp default
  By default, WinTouch updates Created, Modified, and Accessed together instead of only Modified and Accessed.

• Grouped boolean flags
  Short options can be grouped for fast CMD usage, such as -amc, -np, and -rm.

• Long path support
  Handles Windows long paths beyond legacy MAX_PATH limits using native Windows path handling.

• Unicode path support
  Works with Unicode filenames and paths through Windows wide-character APIs.

• Directory timestamp support
  Updates timestamps on directories as well as files.

• Wildcard targets
  Expands CMD-style wildcard targets such as *.txt, *.go, and logs\*.json.

• Parent directory creation
  -p / --parents creates missing parent folders before touching the target file.

• No-create mode
  -n / --no-create updates only existing files and skips missing paths.

• Reparse-point control
  -f / --follow-reparse follows reparse points to their targets, while -i / --ignore-reparse skips reparse points entirely.

• UAC relaunch
  -r / --runas relaunches through Windows UAC for protected paths.

• CMD-first behavior
  Designed for direct use from CMD and batch files, with Windows-style help aliases such as /?, /H, and /HELP.

WinTouch is Windows-first. It is not intended to be a POSIX compatibility layer.

WinTouch is inspired by BSD touch, but this repository does not redistribute FreeBSD source files.

See PROVENANCE.md for upstream reference links.

WinTouch original code and documentation are released under the Zero-Clause BSD license (0BSD).

See LICENSE.