fwrite as owner

luiddog

I want to use fopen, fwrite, fclose on a file with permission 644. How can I do that?

NogDog

Some possibilities:

Log in as root and change the owner of the file to the web server user that runs your PHP scripts.
Have the file be created by a PHP script so that its owner is the web server user.
Create a separate script that uses "sudo" or other techniques to run itself as the file owner so that it can do the required file operations, then call that script from your PHP script (using shell_exec() or other related functions).

luiddog

NogDog wrote:
1. Log in as root and change the owner of the file to the web server user that runs your PHP scripts.

How would I do that? I can log into cpanel, but then what? Thanks.

NogDog

If you just have a user account on a shared host, you probably can't. In that case, you'd have to contact the host's helpdesk to have them change it for you.

Is it necessary that the file have 644 permissions, or can you change it to 666 (read/write for all)?

exponder

luiddog wrote:
How would I do that? I can log into cpanel, but then what? Thanks.

Well, I guess we assume you don't have ftp access? If you do, just connect through FTP. After that, depending on what software you're using.. you should be able to right click on the file.. and find a "Permissions" feature some where.

Another idea is if the server is on a unix machine you should be able to find a php or cgi 'command line' runner. If you got that down.. then just do "chmod 665 /path/to/file.ext" command.

luiddog

exponder wrote:
...depending on what software you're using.. you should be able to right click on the file.. and find a "Permissions" feature some where.

I don't have a problem changing the permission. Right now it's set to 666. But what I want is to have it at 644.

NogDog wrote:
Is it necessary that the file have 644 permissions, or can you change it to 666 (read/write for all)?

Well it's my htaccess file that is currently set to 666. I have users add their personal site (i.e. www.mydomain.com/Username). After they have selected a name that doesn't exsists and doesn't have any characters other than letters and number it writes to htaccess as RewriteRules.

The reason I need to use fwrite with 644 is because twice I've had the htaccess changed by a hack to:

RewriteEngine On 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*google.* [OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*ask.* [OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*yahoo.* [OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*excite.* [OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*altavista.* [OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*msn.* [OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*netscape.* [OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*aol.* [OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*hotbot.* [OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*goto.* [OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*infoseek.* [OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*mamma.* [OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*alltheweb.* [OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*lycos.* [OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*search.* [OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*metacrawler.* [OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*dogpile.* 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://avaseyes.com/db/go.php?link=1 [R=301,L]

I would just use chmod but I can't with my hoster. When I contacted my hoster with this problem they said

for that, you should change the permissoin to 644, and use the fopen, fwrite and fclose to write to it as the account holder, the file does not need to be writable by the world for this to happen. The server is running in suexec mode so 644 is all the permission you need to write to the file with your username. you can also use the exec() with a $cmd command to do this via shell scripting throuhg php, you would be able to use chmod in that if you wanted to go that route.

But I don't really know how to do that.

exponder

I've never use shell commands in php myself, however I did find this that should help you.

Discussion originally from - ( http://us3.php.net/chmod )

Note that mode is not automatically assumed to be an octal value, so strings (such as "g+w") will not work properly. To ensure the expected operation, you need to prefix mode with a zero (0):

<?php
chmod("/somedir/somefile", 755);  // decimal; probably incorrect  

chmod("/somedir/somefile", "u+rwx,go+rx"); // string; incorrect      

chmod("/somedir/somefile", 0755);  // octal; correct value of mode
?>

neil at 11 out of 10
11-Apr-2006 07:20
If you get a warning like chmod(): Operation not permitted in /home/folder/public_html/admin/includefiles/fileupload.php on line 24

You can use the ftp_site() function to send a CHMOD command through.
<?php

$ftp_details['ftp_user_name'] = $row['username'];
$ftp_details['ftp_user_pass'] = $row['password'];
$ftp_details['ftp_root'] = '/public_html/';
$ftp_details['ftp_server'] = 'ftp'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];

function chmod_11oo10($path, $mod, $ftp_details)
{
   // extract ftp details (array keys as variable names)
   extract ($ftp_details);

   // set up basic connection
   $conn_id = ftp_connect($ftp_server);

   // login with username and password
   $login_result = ftp_login($conn_id, $ftp_user_name, $ftp_user_pass);

   // try to chmod $path directory
   if (ftp_site($conn_id, 'CHMOD '.$mod.' '.$ftp_root.$path) !== false) {
       $success=TRUE;
   } 
   else {
       $success=FALSE;
   }

   // close the connection
   ftp_close($conn_id);
   return $success;
}
?>
The key thing to remember is that the document root and the ftp root are not the same.
e.g. document root may be "/home/folder/public_html/"
but the ftp root might be "/public_html/"

Hope this helps someone. You might need this solution if you are on a shared server.

It's a start at least.