Apparently, what touch(1) uses internally is utimensat(2). I haven't found anything on CPAN yet* that directly supports what you want to do, but in theory, you could use FFI::Platypus to link to it. Time::HiRes's utime does use utimensat, but doesn't support setting the AT_SYMLINK_NOFOLLOW flag needed to modify the symlink instead of the file it points to.

* Update: See here.

But what you want is easy to implement using plain Perl functions: instead of touching the old symlink, create a new one and rename it over the old one:

#! /usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

use File::Touch qw{ touch };

sub show_stat {
    system qw( stat file link );
}

unlink qw( file link new_link );
touch('file');
symlink 'file', 'link';
show_stat();

sleep 1;
symlink 'file', 'new_link';
rename new_link => 'link';
show_stat();
[download]

Your example sets the atime/mtime to current time. I need to set the atime and mtime of the link to a specific value. I updated my question to be more clear.

The documentation seems clear enough, no?

atime => $time

    If defined, use this time (in epoch seconds) instead of current time for access time.

mtime => $time

    If defined, use this time (in epoch seconds) instead of current time for modification time.

My guess is that touch -h is using the lutimes(3) system call (where available) which a quick ripgrep through the perl source doesn't show any reference to. You theoretically could wrap it directly yourself with Inline::C but I don't think you're otherwise going to have luck directly from perl.

Edit: derp, wrong man section fixed

My guess is that touch -h is using the lutimes(3) system call

No (at least not in GNU coreutils), but that's an excellent hint nonetheless - a search on CPAN reveals File::lchown that does support lutimes!