Editing files while keeping {A,C,M}-time

On most stat implementations, there are three separate time fields in the structure

atime is access time, mtime is modification time, and ctime is change time.

What you might notice; there isn't any creation time. So for example, in my implementation of this site's generator, I sort the posts by their creation date, but since there is actually no creation date, I use the initial mtime. Meaning, I constantly set the mtime to the initial mtime after modifying the file.

So in order to edit a files, I wrote this perl script

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $file = shift or die "usage: $0 <file> <fork> [args...]\n";
my $time = (stat $file)[9] or die $!;
system(@ARGV);
utime undef, $time, $file;