The shell scripts are almost always slower and the code is neither readable nor compact.

bash
for i in `seq 1 10`; do touch $i; done

Perl and derivatives
perl -e 'open F, ">", $_ for 1..10'
perl -e 'qx[touch $_] for 1..10'
ruby -e '10.times{|i| File.new i.to_s, "w"}'
ruby -e '10.times{|i| %x[touch #{i}]}'