Sometimes I want to make a minor edit to a text file (e.g., fix a typo), but I want to keep its modification time unchanged. (Motivation: modtime is useful for listing directories in chronological order, for telling when a file's content was last substantively updated, etc. I don't want a trivial edit to obliterate this information.)This is certainly possible: Unix allows me to manually set the modtime to anything I want (this does set the ctime to the present, which is fine by me). E.g., with touch -t <time>, or with the utimes(2) system call. This question is about a simple way to edit a file and then set the modification time to exactly what it was before editing. I am mainly interested in solutions that are editor-agnostic, i.e., if emacs has a save-file-no-update-mtime command, that's interesting but not what I'm looking for.
How do I modify a file without updating the modification time?
timestamps