Sure it does. But the OP said that he wants to "touch a file". That does not always mean to update the access and/or modification times. Touching a file is a fast and easy way of creating a non-existing file. Perl's utime does not do it. It is not written in documentation that it does not do it, which is logical. But guess what, "man 1 touch" on my system doesn't also say that touch creates files if they don't exist. The only hint you get is the mentioning of the "-c" or "--no-create" option. And that could have caused some confusion, depending on the task at hand - hence my comment. :)