The touch program will create empty files.
While empty files seem overly useless, it can be critical for installing and
compiling programs.
Creating files follows the syntax
$ touch [options] filename
Using the -m flag will allow you to update the timestamp on the file.
Some clusters or supercomputers will auto-delete files that have been
unmodified in a previous timespan, so using touch -m to modify the timestamp
can be used to prevent those deletions.
[Note: some clusters/supercomputers specifically ban doing this, so if that’s
the case… don’t.]