Python touch file timestamp

Change Language. Related Articles. Table of Contents. Improve Article. Save Article. Like Article. Last Updated : 03 Jan, Both the variables would contain time. More than merely touching the file, it destroys any content f used to contain. Improve this answer. This works, thanks. And thanks to J. Sebastian for explaining why it works. You mean if replacedText is not content , don't you?

John Machin: Yes. Thank you. These programs do the minimum. So I think they are fast. Thanks for the detailed answer. My question was actually more general: I want to replace the occurrence of a given string with a different given string.

However, it's true that in the codes in your question, there are instructions like that: "replace oldtext, newtext " in which oldtext and newtext are not string values but names of objects. LandedGently It's precisely because these instructions are contradictory with the phrasing "occurrences of 'oldtext' with 'newtext'" that I asked you : "Do you mean that you want to replace all the strings 'oldtext' present in a file with strings 'newtext'?

LandedGently And you answered : "I want to replace all strings 'oldtext' with 'newtext'" And now it's the contrary. It is disappointing. I wonder how I should have phrased my question; wasn't it enough long and trying to be understood? Anyhow, thanks for your help :- — LandedGently. If you have a specific time and date you would like to be used for all the timestamps of a file or directory, touch command will gladly accempt a timestamp template with -t command line option.

As you can see from the output, both access time and modification time got updated. The reason change time ctime is set to a different date is because this field reflects the last update to the inode behind a file, and always reflects the current time.

If you fancy adding a year to the timestamp specification, you can specify something from both past and future. The meaning of each is described later. All attributes are floating-point numbers and represent Unix time Epoch time, Posix time. How to convert this value to datetime is described later. See your operating system documentation for details.

See the following article on getting the size of files and folders. You can also get timestamps with the os.

In Python 3. Path object as an argument instead of a path string.