touch: cannot change times on logfile.xxx

I'd hope that your touch program wasn't so broken as to not report errno. I'd expect to see something like:

touch: cannot change times on logfile.xxx; Permission denied

And I note that one reply here also suffers from this pet peeve of mine. If you write your attempt at using utime correctly to include:     utime( ... )  or  die "... $!\n"; then you'll see why it failed.

I suspect there is more difference between the "working" and "not working" cases than what you described. Specifically, I suspect that your "working" cases were not via a CGI script but that your "not working" cases were done via CGI.

So I suspect that the problem isn't that utime doesn't work, but instead that your CGI scripts don't have permission to modify the file in question.

Again, this is mostly guesses.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")