The touch command without any command line options will create a new, empty file, where the access time (atime), change time (ctime) and modify time (mtime) of the file is the current time. For example, let's say foo.txt is created.

touch foo.txt

The stat command can be used to display the access time, change time and modify time of foo.txt.

~]$ stat foo.txt
  File: ‘/home/john.doe/foo.txt’
  Size: 0               Blocks: 0          IO Block: 65536  regular empty file
Device: 2fh/47d Inode: 421849      Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--)  Uid: (john.doe / john.doe)   Gid: ( 2001/admins)
Context: system_u:object_r:nfs_t:s0
Access: 2022-03-30 00:38:40.200196000 -0500
Modify: 2022-03-30 00:38:40.200196000 -0500
Change: 2022-03-30 00:38:40.202215000 -0500
 Birth: -

The touch command with the -a and -t options can be used to create a file with a specific access time. In this example, foo.txt is created with an access time of 01/01/2022 at 00:00:00.

touch -a -t 202201010000.00 foo.txt

The stat command can be used to verify that foo.txt has an access time of 01/01/2022 00:00:00.

~]$ stat foo.txt
  File: ‘/home/john.doe/foo.txt’
  Size: 0               Blocks: 0          IO Block: 65536  regular empty file
Device: 2fh/47d Inode: 421849      Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--)  Uid: (john.doe / john.doe)   Gid: ( 2001/admins)
Context: system_u:object_r:nfs_t:s0
Access: 2022-01-01 00:00:00.000000000 -0600
Modify: 2022-03-30 00:38:40.200196000 -0500
Change: 2022-03-30 00:38:40.202215000 -0500
 Birth: -

Similarly, the touch command with the -m and -t options can be used to create a file with a specific modify time.

touch -m -t 202201010000.00 foo.txt

Or, the access time and modify time can be set as a single command.

touch -a -m -t 202201010000.00 foo.txt

Or, the access time and modify time can be set like this, which has a bit more user friendly format.

touch -d "2022-01-01 00:00:00.000000000 +0530" foo.txt