Jim Salter

602 points
Jim Salter
West Columbia

I'm a mercenary systems administrator located in Columbia, SC. My first real hands-on experience with open source software was running Apache on FreeBSD webservers in the late 90s and early 2000s. Since then, I moved on to Samba, BIND, qmail, postfix, and anything and everything else that grabbed my attention. I currently support Windows, FreeBSD, Debian, and Ubuntu workstations and servers doing just about everything that you can possibly do with any or all of them. RAH said it best - specialization is for insects!

Authored Content

A great time to be a Linux person

It's 2015, and there are no computers in my house that run anything but Linux. Yep, I'm one of those people. My name is Jim Salter, and I'm a professional Linux sysadmin and…

Authored Comments

* changes access and modification times, sorry.

Touch is not actually for creating files; creating files is a side effect of what it really is and does. `touch file` updates the access time of `file` - which has the side effect of creating `file` as an empty file with zero blocks, if `file` didn't already exist.

me@banshee:/tmp$ touch file ; stat file
File: 'file'
Size: 0 Blocks: 0 IO Block: 4096 regular empty file
Device: 841h/2113d Inode: 692239 Links: 1
Access: (0664/-rw-rw-r--) Uid: ( 1000/ me) Gid: ( 1000/ me)
Access: 2018-04-03 14:34:01.440460376 -0400
Modify: 2018-04-03 14:34:01.440460376 -0400
Change: 2018-04-03 14:34:01.440460376 -0400
Birth: -

me@banshee:/tmp$ touch file ; stat file
File: 'file'
Size: 0 Blocks: 0 IO Block: 4096 regular empty file
Device: 841h/2113d Inode: 692239 Links: 1
Access: (0664/-rw-rw-r--) Uid: ( 1000/ me) Gid: ( 1000/ me)
Access: 2018-04-03 14:34:43.336937192 -0400
Modify: 2018-04-03 14:34:43.336937192 -0400
Change: 2018-04-03 14:34:43.336937192 -0400
Birth: -