fopen failing, permission denied

I have the following code snippet: $h = fopen("$path/file.txt", 'x+'); And it generates the following error: Warning: fopen(/home/...../myarea/file.txt): failed to open stream: Permission denied The path is correct, but the php process doesn't seem to have file permissions in the folder. Is there some magic I can do to allow php to have file rights to the "myarea" folder? (This is on a purchased ISP site) Thanks DanB