What does it mean to 'touch' a target in make?

Question

For example, from the mingw32-make.exe --help option:

-t, --touch                 Touch targets instead of remaking them.

Answer 1

It just means to update the file modification time, so that next time, it won't consider those files old.

Answer 2

Touching a file means to effectively make a write to the file, but without changing any file data.

If the file doesn't exist, it'll be created as an empty file, otherwise its modification time will just be updated to the present time.