Re: Write Permission

> Hello, I just coded a upload function for my site, only to discover that I > can't copy files from /tmp directory to my directory as Apache is running as > user "nobody" and as such does not have write permission to my directory. Yup. > What can I do now? Is there any way to change the user of Apache through php > code?? Or is there any other way? Any suggestion will be greatly > appreciated. Running Apache as some other user is *possible*, but extremely dangerous. Read httpd.conf, and you'll find the thing to change to make it happen, but don't do it unless you *really* don't care about security. A more realistic option would be to install PHP as a stand-alone binary (aka "CGI") and wrap suExec (http://apache.org) around that, using a different mime-type and extension (say .phpcgi and application/x-httpd-phpcgi) to invoke *that* PHP, and then use that extension for your form upload. This then allows a .phpcgi file to do anything *you* can do -- so you need to be vigilant about the permissions/existence of any files named *.phpcgi for security reasons, or any httpd.conf or .htaccess alterations of files to be executed as if they were .phpcgi files (ie, running with your permissions). Another possibility is to create a shell script, or Perl script, or even a PHP script executed by the PHP binary above, just like a Perl script, that is owned by you, and can copy the files as needed from /tmp to your directory. You could just make a directory be writable by the world, as noted below, but obviously security issues, depending on what you do with the files in that directory, and who can read/execute said files, make this a Bad Idea in most cases. This was made difficult "on purpose", since to make it easy for you to copy files from /tmp to your own directory with your own user owning them would be a pretty nasty security hole. Yes, it sucks, but having your server be trashed sucks more. > I just also found out that I can write to one of the directories if I set > its permission to 775 but not to others. I can only do it with permission > 777. Why? Because user "nobody" owns that directory, or is in the group that owns the directory? It could be that somebody has anticipated this problem, and has created that directory and its ownership specifically so that you can do what you're trying to do. cd to that directory, and then cd .. (one up from it). Then do "ls -als | less" and look carefully at the owner and group on that directory.