utime

utime LIST

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. Returns the number of files successfully changed. The inode change time of each file is set to the current time. For example, this code has the same effect as the Unix touch(1) command when the files already exist.

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

Note: Under NFS, touch(1) uses the time of the NFS server, not the time of the local machine. If there is a time synchronization problem, the NFS server and local machine will have different times.

Since perl 5.7.2, if the first two elements of the list are undef, then the utime(2) function in the C library will be called with a null second argument. On most systems, this will set the file's access and modification times to the current time (i.e. equivalent to the example above.)

    utime undef, undef, @ARGV;