Re: How to get server user?

On Feb 16, 2015, at 7:16 PM, Jason Edgecombe wrote:

On 02/16/2015 08:59 PM, Jeffry Killen wrote:

I've been looking over the output from phpinfo to find a way to portably get the server user name. It is not obvious to me... Can I get that from an $_ENV or $_SERVER value? I have a web base cms system with a file editor and want to test for ownership of the files and directories without having to hard code the server name. I can get file owner ship but if I want to verify it is the server user account, I would do: (pseudo code) $_name = getOwner() if($_name == < portable reference to server user name>) { // proceed } This would be for enhanced access permissions analysis. If a file is being written to by the server user (via php code) it would be helpful to determine that to forstall error message generation. Thanks JK

I suggest just writing to the file and catching the error exception. There are multiple file systems with various permission schemes. One examples include is Linux ext4 with POSIX ACL's. Another example is OpenAFS where special ACL's are used while the 'group' and 'other' unix mode bits are mostly ignored. Selinux is another ACL scheme that might be effect. I've had multiple user non-web non-PHP applications 'fail' to write files because it detected that the mode bits were incorrect when the write() syscalls would have succeeded. Please save yourself and your sysadmin some grief by simplying the code to attempt the operation and let the OS and file system verify the access. Sincerely, Jason (Just another Linux admin)

Thanks for the info. So, in short, I should just hard code it? Thanks for time and attention JK