Oops. I thought it said 'mtime' up there (rather than 'ctime', as I see now).

I think that's OS-dependent, somewhat. On Mac OS X, I was able to change the mtime of a file. I wouldn't be surprised if some systems require administrative access (or just file ownership), but I haven't tested anywhere else.

Update: I tried it on Debian GNU/Linux too, and it works the same way.

$ touch testme
$ ls -l testme 
-rw-r--r--  1 kyle kyle 0 2007-02-04 13:12 testme
$ perl -e 'utime time,1111111111,"testme";'
$ ls -l testme 
-rw-r--r--  1 kyle kyle 0 2005-03-17 19:58 testme
$
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