Re: dired-do-touch

[Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@elta.co.il> writes:
>> There's the set-file-modes primitive for changing modes.  Are there
>> equivalent primitives for changing owner and group?
>
> I don't think so.  FWIW, I think we should add them.

I completely agree that we should add primitives for changing
owner and group and use them in dired.

Actually, I never understood why dired needs separate commands for
external programs that can be easily run by `dired-do-shell-command',
like e.g. by typing `! chown owner RET' on marked files.  The main
reason I wanted to add the touch dired command is that with an initial
value for the time at its prompt (I posted a patch for this earlier)
the user can edit an initial value.  And of course, since dired commands
for changing file attributes already exist it makes sense to use Emacs
primitives for them for achieve independence from external programs.

>> > There is the function `date-to-time' which parses a time string.
>> > But it should be improved to accept the format of the touch program.
>> 
>> Thanks, I missed it.
>
> IMHO, we don't _have_ to emulate the `touch' program's date/time
> format.  The format of the arguments that `touch' accepts is a result
> of a certain user-interface design that is appropriate for a
> command-line utility.  Emacs could in principle present an entirely
> different UI, since it is not a command-line app.  We just need to
> support the same _functionality_, but not necessarily the same
> _format_.

While I agree that we don't have to emulate the `touch' program
format, I think that we ought to add it as one of the possible time
formats accepted by the `date-to-time' and other Emacs time-parsing
functions, because this format is very compact which makes it
convenient for the user to enter.

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/