You have been biten by the last paragraph of utime documentation:

Note that only passing one of the first two elements as "undef" will be equivalent of passing it as 0 and will not have the same effect as described when they are both "undef". This case will also trigger an uninitialized warning.

and you may check this is so by using -w: 

G:\>perl -w -e "utime(undef, 1156817846, 'foo') #
Mon Aug 28 22:17:26 2006"
Use of uninitialized value in utime at -e line 1.

[download]

And the following seems to do something more similar to what you want: 

G:\>perl -w -e "utime(-A 'foo', 1156817846, 'foo') #Mon Aug 28 22:17:2
+6 2006"

[download]

Updates:

  1. as noted by belg4mit, utime docs were updated at 5.8.1 (as can be seen here: 5.8.1 utime vs 5.8.0 utime).
  2. Windows has weird ideas about tracking access and modification times.

In reply to Re: utime of dirs on win32 by ferreira
in thread utime of dirs on win32 by belg4mit

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