Equivalent of Linux `touch` to create an empty file with PowerShell

Using the append redirector ">>" resolves the issue where an existing file is deleted:

echo $null >> filename

To create a blank file:

New-Item example.txt

Note that in old versions of PowerShell, you may need to specify -ItemType file .

To update the timestamp of a file:

(gci example.txt).LastWriteTime = Get-Date

Here is a version that creates a new file if it does not exist or updates the timestamp if it does exist.

Function Touch-File
{
    $file = $args[0]
    if($file -eq $null) {
        throw "No filename supplied"
    }

    if(Test-Path $file)
    {
        (Get-ChildItem $file).LastWriteTime = Get-Date
    }
    else
    {
        echo $null > $file
    }
}

In PowerShell you can create a similar Touch function as such:

function touch {set-content -Path ($args[0]) -Value ($null)} 

Usage:

touch myfile.txt

Source

There are a bunch of worthy answers already, but I quite like the alias of New-Item which is just: ni

You can also forgo the file type declaration (which I assume is implicit when an extension is added), so to create a javascript file with the name of 'x' in my current directory I can simply write:

ni x.js

3 chars quicker than touch!