Create empty file using python
Of course there IS a way to create files without opening. It's as easy as calling os.mknod("newfile.txt")
. The only drawback is that this call requires root privileges on OSX.
There is no way to create a file without opening it There is os.mknod("newfile.txt")
(but it requires root privileges on OSX). The system call to create a file is actually open()
with the O_CREAT
flag. So no matter how, you'll always open the file.
So the easiest way to simply create a file without truncating it in case it exists is this:
open(x, 'a').close()
Actually you could omit the .close()
since the refcounting GC of CPython will close it immediately after the open()
statement finished - but it's cleaner to do it explicitely and relying on CPython-specific behaviour is not good either.
In case you want touch
's behaviour (i.e. update the mtime in case the file exists):
import os
def touch(path):
with open(path, 'a'):
os.utime(path, None)
You could extend this to also create any directories in the path that do not exist:
basedir = os.path.dirname(path)
if not os.path.exists(basedir):
os.makedirs(basedir)