#5 Never change time/date stamp if file is not modified

[Anonymous]

It would be great if timestamps were untouched if the file is not modified.
I.e. the functionality activated with the option -k, --keepdate would always be activated if no changes are made to the target file.

The benefit would be e.g. possibility to run dos2unix on all sourcecode files in e.g. a commit hook script without triggering make to rebuild all files afterwards.

I can't see any potential drawbacks. Nobody wants to touch the timestamp on an untouched file.

[Erwin Waterlander]

Hi,

The change in the timestamp shows that the file has been processed. Similarly if you would run

sed -i s/aa/bb/ foo.txt

, the timestamp of foo.txt will change even if there is no "aa" in foo.txt. The file did run through a filter, and it was replaced by the filter output. Ergo, the timestamp changes. I think this is expected behavior in Unix like environments.

What you could do is use the dos2unix -i option. Option -ic will make dos2unix print only the files that would be converted. This command will leave files without dos line breaks untouched:

dos2unix -ic0 *.txt | xargs -r -0 dos2unix

This command will find C files that have dos line breaks:

find -name '*.c' -print0 | xargs -r -0 dos2unix -ic

You can use the output for another xargs that runs dos2unix.

I see no problem in using the -k option. Changing line breaks doesn't change the compiler output, there is never a need to rebuild.