error on chown

Anon

good day my fellow programmers,

please help.

can anybody help me with my problem? i used the CHOWN command to change the owner of the user but it says in php.net that only the superuser can do the chown. is there any way or is there a script that can chown the user?

thanks in advance.

jojit

Anon

Well what that means is that the php executable/module would have to have superuser privliges and most webspace providers won't want you to have that much power, thou if your running your own server you can do what you want with it.

Just don't ask me how to change the setting cause I'm a Windows geek not a Unix git, I know the concepts quite well but I'm not well versed in how to put them to use.

Anon

Chown is simply not allowed for non-root users.

Anon

Well given that it's part of the PHP language construct I'd have to guess you could give it the right to use that command through one methood or another, otherwise it'd be kinda useless to have it in there now wouldn't it?

Anon

Under unix you can't change the ownership of a file, even if it is your own, if you are not root.

I guess there are instances where root might want to run php scripts,
but if you only run it under a webserver it would be quite useless.

Anon

I ran into a similar problem (my ISP graciously allows php on my personal homepage.) I assume the reason you need to chown is to give write access to php.

In my case, the webserver is running as user "www-data", group "www-data"...but all of my personal page stuff is under my username.

The workaround was to write a quick php script to create a file (or whole directory), then to ftp into my public_html directory, create a directory for www-data to be able to write in, momentarily chmod it to 777, access the script from my browser to create the directory (which was then created with the owner 'www-data' so the webserver can do things in it), then to chmod the directory back to normal.

The result is a webserver-writable folder that I can keep php-generated logfiles, temp files, data, etc. in without making it world-writable.

Hopefully this helps...