Re: Copying Files to the Web Directory

Jason, Thanks for the reply, and you confirmed that I'm caught between the devil and the deep! At the same time, it's good to know that permissions work! As my client is real twitchy about changing directories, etc. I guess I'll write a little script to do all this and he can run it from his home directory after a SSH login. That will do everything for him automatically. It's a bit of a pain really, because he has to use three programs:

        WS-FTP to upload the files
        Administration web page to do the conversion to PHP
        Tera Term SSH to run a "publish_this" script.

(I know we could have done the upload with PHP, but when WS-FTP costs only $30 it ain't worth it.) Thank you for your advice - Miles At 08:25 PM 2/26/01 -0700, Jason Cox wrote:

PHP runs as the webserver user which in most cases is user nobody. For PHP to write to a directory, it has to be writable to this directory. A possible solution would be to compile a PHP executable and run a script from cron to copy the files periodically. By using cron and a cgi-version of PHP you can run it as your desired user. Jason ----- Original Message ----- From: "Miles Thompson" <milesthompson@ns.sympatico.ca> To: <php-general@lists.php.net> Sent: Monday, February 26, 2001 7:18 PM Subject: [PHP] Copying Files to the Web Directory I have a customer who insists on using Front Page, but wants protection against intruders on all his web pages. I envisioned a solution where he works in Front Page, then all his files are ftp'd to a directory on the server, opened and re-written as .php files with all links changed from "something.htm" to "something.php" and then copied to a directory on the same level called "test". So far so good, and this allows a php-one-liner to provide the necessary security. Now I'm stuck, because I have to copy these files from test to the location of the web page itself. And I've not been able to do it, and I can't do it, as far as I can see without giving world-writeable permission to the web directory. Here's the skeletal directory structure ... .../www.website.com /admin /upload /test The script (php page) I'm using to do this is stored in /admin and I want to copy everything in /test (and any subdir's it may have) to www.website.com. On the server, logged in as root, I can execute a shell script named newpub-web, located in www.website.com, which consists of:

     rm -f *.php
     rm -f ./graphics/*
     cp -fR ./admin/test/* .

I've tried executing newpub-web from a php script, which changes to the the working directory to www.website.com, as: exec( "newpub-web"), or system( "newpub-web" ) or passthru( "newpub-web"). None have worked. I've also tried executing the commands directly using system(), all without effect, no errors, nothing. Do I have to change the group of www.website.com to nobody? That seems to be an awful security hole. Stymied in Nova Scotia - Miles Thompson -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, e-mail: php-general-unsubscribe@lists.php.net For additional commands, e-mail: php-general-help@lists.php.net To contact the list administrators, e-mail: php-list-admin@lists.php.net