hello everyone i am new to this forum and was wondering if you all could help me out.... i am looking for a touch command that can touch directories as well as files that does not involve sygwin... any and all help would be appreiciated 
- touch does change the mtime on directories
- what does cygwin have to do with it?
Better, tell us what you want to do (what is your goal) , not what you think you're supposed to do.
sorry about the rambling...was up rather late...anyway I found the touch utility and it works great. All I needed to do was touch large directories of files to change their dates for backup purposes (they were mislabeled at creation and the damn backup program freaks out when it sees backups it "missed" from 2001) to a date in the present week or so.
Ah, so you want to touch directory contents. You don't need a seperate command, though, just put two together, one to find files, one to touch them.
find path/to/directory -exec touch '{}' ';'
Though I suspect from your posts that you're leaving out a crucial little detail. Are you even using a UNIX?