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Touch
Welcome to the Touch page! Touch is a right-click context menu item that integrates into the Explorer of Windows 9x, Windows NT4, Windows 2000 or Windows XP. It is meant to provide you with the opportunity to "touch" files, i.e. to set the files date to the current or an arbitrary date. The latest version even provides support for the x64 Editions of XP and W2K3 Server.
 
Dowload Touch version 1.1.0.3 built on 07/10/05.
In case this setup complains about the version of your comctl32.dll, download and install Microsoft's Common Controls Update and then restart the touch setup. This setup is a hybrid setup that works on NT4, W2K, XP, W2K3 Server, Windows 9x/ME and on the x64 Editions of XP and W2K3 Server.
Downloads thus far:     3471
Size:314329 bytes
MD5 Checksum:f6af13003396dd3072bd273bce4cbaf4




Older versions:

Touch version 1.1.0.2 built on 07/20/03.
In case this setup complains about the version of your comctl32.dll, download and install Microsoft's Common Controls Update and then restart the touch setup.
Downloads thus far:     3070
Size:260669 bytes
MD5 Checksum:172814ad7aad0ba1ce11ff715c34e125


Touch version 1.1.0.1 built on 06/09/03.
Downloads thus far:     2380
Size:258093 bytes
MD5 Checksum:2afc8f64de161d0c72d8e4825394e780


Touch version 1.0.0.1 built on 04/26/02.

Downloads thus far:     2651
Size:234993 bytes
MD5 Checksum:a72de35d9ecc90ea78f90803b21320eb


What is it?

Touch is an Explorer context menu item and - once installed - looks like the following if you right click on a file or a directory or any number of them:

If you choose the "Touch" item, you are presented with a dialog like the following:



Here you either select the radio button named "Current Time and Date" or you choose "The following Time and Date" where you can specify any valid time and date in the controls below the radio controls. If you click 'Touch now', the previously selected files will get the specified time and date (i.e. will be "touched" with this time and date). If you have selected a directory, all files and directories underneath this directory will be touched as well (note that directories itself cannot be touched under Windows 9x/ME) if you have ticked the check mark 'Recurse into subdirectories'. Note also that depending of the operating system where Touch gets installed, either an ANSI version of the plugin (toucha.dll - Windows 9x/ME) or a UNICODE version (touchw.dll - NT/W2K/XP) gets installed, so exotic filenames on far east versions of NT/W2K/XP should not at all be a problem. Version 1.1.0.1 also has the feature to touch read-only files as well if you tick the 'Touch read-only files as well' check mark: It first removes the read-only attribute, touches the file and reapplies the read-only attribute. Version 1.1.0.1 also reports failures about failed touch operations in a separate window instead of single annoying messageboxes per failure as in version 1.0.0.1. Version 1.1.0.2 is the same version as Version 1.1.0.1 for users of Consumer Windows (aka Windows 9x/ME). For XP users, the difference is that this version shows the visual effects of XP.

Why I wrote this cool program...

...actually, to be honest, this is not at all a program. It is rather sort of a "plugin" into Explorer. I wrote it, because during my master thesis which I made from August 2001 until February 2002, I often had to touch source files to force a recompile of my binary. Thus the idea came to me to write a small explorer plugin for this purpose. Note that I wrote the whole shebang in my spare time on my own computers, so this is not at all the intellectual property of the company where I wrote my thesis but instead completely mine.
 

What was technically challenging in writing this program?

Uuh, ooh,... nothing, no, really! Anybody can do that, everything is pretty well documented. The only hard thing was figuring out that I better don't provide a version of Touch that is dynamically linked against the MFC and the runtime binaries, so this version is statically linked.
Last Updated on Sunday, 10 July 2005 09:13