Re: Permission denied when executing 'copy' command in a PHPscript

Ashley Sheridan wrote:

On Mon, 2008-09-15 at 17:33 -0400, Edward Diener wrote:

Thiago H. Pojda wrote:

On 9/15/08, Edward Diener <eldiener@tropicsoft.com> wrote:

In a PHP file upload script which looks like: $htmlplace="aplace"; if ($_FILES['HtmlFile']['name'] != "") {

       $filenamex = basename($_FILES['HtmlFile']['name']);
       copy($_FILES['HtmlFile']['tmp_name'],$htmlplace."/".$filenamex);

} I am getting the error message: <br /> <b>Warning</b>: copy(aplace/ahtml.html) [<a href='function.copy'>function.copy</a>]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in <b>/home/directory/anotherdirectory/makecopy2.php</b> on line <b>6</b><br /> This was working perfectly before so I am at a loss as to why it is now failing. Does anybody have any idea what could be happening and what the Permission denied refers to and means ? Thanks !

Apache - or your http process - process (default www-data in *nix) has to have access to the file/dir in order to copy it.

Does the error message mean that access is denied in the 'from' file ( $_FILES['HtmlFile']['tmp_name'] ) or the 'to' location ( aplace/ahtml.html ) ?

Did you check file/dir permissions? Has anything changed? Your sysadmin could have changed the user running apache or dir perms.

What is the 'user running Apache' and how do I determine it ? The 'to' directory has a Linux permission of 755. The PHP script has a permission setting of 644.

To determine what user Apache is running in, at the command line (open a terminal window or something) and type "ps -e" without the quotes. You should see a couple of entries either for Apache or httpd which is the web server.

This is a web hosting site of my employer, so I do not have direct access to logon to the server. There is a set of PHP scripts which represent a limited access to files, but nothing which lets me logon to the Linux box.

If you are getting an access denied message on an uploaded file, it's likely that you don't have write permissions to the actual directory you are trying to copy the file to. Make sure it has write permissions for the Apache user; just make the Apache user the owner of the directory, and do a chmod 755 to it.

I have talked to my employer who will talk to the web host. The PHP scripts which provide limited access allow one to change the Linux permissions for a directory but do not allow one to change the owner of the directory.