3.2.186 utime

utime LIST

This function changes the access and modification times on each file of a list of files. The first two elements of the list must be the numerical access and modification times, in that order. The function returns the number of files successfully changed. The inode change time of each file is set to the current time. Here's an example of a touch command:

#!/usr/bin/perl
$now = time;
utime $now, $now, @ARGV;

and here's a more sophisticated touch command with a bit of error checking:

#!/usr/bin/perl
$now = time;
@cannot = grep {not utime $now, $now, $_} @ARGV;
die "$0: Could not touch @cannot.\n" if @cannot;

The standard touch command will actually create missing files, something like this:

$now = time;
foreach $file (@ARGV) {
    utime $now, $now, $file
        or open TMP, ">>$file"
        or warn "Couldn't touch $file: $!\n";
}

To read the times from existing files, use stat.