chown() help plz

[Anon]

I have PHP running as the user nobody. My script needs to INSERT a record into a database and then copy a skeleton folder to a new location. Then the script also needs to change the owner of that directory it just coppied. How do I get chown to work if I am running as nobody. I get 'operation not permitted' which is a filesystem error code. I am running RH7.3. Thanks for your help.

[theslinky]

Hmm... the answer is: you should NOT be able to chown if you are nobody.... think about it, it would be a security flaw if you could :-)

if you really need to chown a file, write a standalone CGI program and give it a setuid root permission (meaning when it is run by the user nobody, it will actually run as root). your PHP can then call this safe and custom chown program (which will run as root) and chown the file to a different user.

-sridhar