Why would one create an empty file?

Question

I saw the command: touch while watching a video about the Terminal

It was something like:

user$ touch testfile
user$ ls
Documents Photos Music testfile

So I couldn't answer to myself:

Why one would want to create an empty file?

If you can, please make a short list of a few applicabilities of it!

Answer 1

I'll give a practical example of when I just used empty files in Ubuntu a few days ago. I was creating a program in C that could symlink files, directories, and entire directories of files. After I finished all my coding, I made a simple shell .sh script that created a "mock" directory structure. Including empty files and directories so I could test my program symlinking these "fake" files.

This makes it easy to:

1. Start the test over easily if something isn't working.
2. Play around with files of no importance (don't want to risk losing actual data).

Answer 2

• To represent a collection of information with no instances.
• When the mere presence or absence of the file is all that matters