this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
1165 points (97.5% liked)

Programmer Humor

19522 readers
185 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] null 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I'm betting that's why none ever materialized. Most tools that can manipulate a file, can also create that file first, so there's just never been a usecase.

Right-clicking the desktop to create a new txt file in Windows feels so natural, but I can't really think of any time you'd want to create a new file and do nothing with it in a CLI.

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You might if some other program checks whether that file exists and behaves differently depending on that.

[–] null 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

But even still, what's a realistic usecase that would that involve needing a blank, unmodified file in that instance?

[–] indepndnt@lemmy.world 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

One use case is if you're running a web server that is configured to return a "maintenance" page instead of the live site if a particular file exists. Which is actually pretty cool because then you don't have to update the config when you need to do something or let your users get a bunch of 502 errors, you just touch maintenance and you're good.

[–] null 2 points 7 months ago

That's a good one!