In a Linux environment, you can use the touch command to create an empty file with a specific name.
For example, you can use the following syntax to create an empty file named my_file.txt in the current directory:
touch my_file.txt
To replicate this behavior in PowerShell, we can use the New-Item cmdlet:
New-Item my_file.txt
This will also create an empty file named my_file.txt in the current directory.
By default, the New-Item cmdlet will display the path of the new file along with its creation date and time.
If you’d like to suppress any output when using the New-Item cmdlet, you can assign the results to $null as follows:
$null = New-Item my_file.txt
The following example shows how to use this syntax in practice.
Example: How to Use Equivalent of “touch” in PowerShell
Suppose that we would like create a new file named my_file.txt in our current directory.
Before we do so, we can first use the following syntax to view all of the files in our current directory:
Get-ChildItem -File
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
We can see that the current directory has three .txt files in it.
We can use the following syntax to create a new file named my_file.txt in our current directory:
New-Item my_file.txt
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that when we use the Get-ChildItem cmdlet again to view the updated contents of our directory we can see that a new file has been added to it named my_file.txt.
If you’d like to suppress any output when using the New-Item cmdlet to create this new file, you can use the following syntax:
$null = New-Item my_file.txt
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that a new item named my_file.txt has been created and no output was shown this time when we used the New-Item cmdlet to create the file.
Note: You can find the complete documentation for the New-Item cmdlet in PowerShell here.
Related Tutorials
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in PowerShell:
PowerShell: How to Delete File if it Exists
PowerShell: How to Find Empty Folders
PowerShell: Check if File Has Been Modified in last 24 Hours
