bug#27942: Bug regarding "touch" command

[L A Walsh]

Paul Eggert wrote:
> L A Walsh wrote:
> > > You run "touch -". Whatever file stdout happens to be associated 
> > > with, gets touched. It's the same idea as "cat -", except with stdout 
> > > rather than stdin.
> >
> > The difference between that and updating due to write activity being
> > mostly that ctime is also written?
>
> No, that's not a difference. Try running 'touch foo; strace touch foo; 
> strace touch - >>foo'. I did that, and saw the same system call being 
> used to alter foo's last-modified time, in both strace outputs.
---
	So the touch command does the same as: 

 echo -n >>'stdout-file'   ?

What was the use-case that touch needed to have
the new feature?

*curious sort*