Setting permissions not permitted

[joe92]

Hi there, I am working on a little CMS site and I have run into a bit of a problem. When the user comes to publish the changes they have made I need to push the new files onto their server. I don't know whether they are on a shared host or not though, and if they are they won't be the root user and so functions like chmod and rmdir will be disallowed. Even if they weren't on a shared host I doubt whether they would be running scripts as root anyway.

 

I cannot ask the user to set the file permissions to 0777 to use the CMS as I know that most people would not do that, I know I wouldn't. So my plan of action was to have the permissions set to 0644 and temporarily change them to 0777 whiles I push the changes then change it back again afterwards. I have a tiny website on a shared host so I am able to test this in the worst of scenarios and these are the errors I get:

Warning: chmod() [function.chmod]: Operation not permitted in ******** on line 20

Warning: fopen(********) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in ******** on line 35

Warning: fwrite() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in ******** on line 39

Warning: fclose() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in ******** on line 40

 

Because I am not the root user chmod is not permitted and because the file permissions are set to 0644 I cannot execute the file system functions which alter the files. It all relies on the permissions being set right. I tried using umask but as someone says in a note on php.net, umask can only remove/delete permissions, it can't grant them. So that seems like a dead end. I can't change ownership either with chown as that requires you to be the root to use too.

 

Wondering what was going on I used fileperms to find out what the permissions were according to the php and got the number 33188. Turns out after a bit of research that this is an octal number, so I converted it and got the number 100644. That looks about right, but I don't know what the 10 is doing before the permissions?

 

Does anyone know how can I get around this problem? I would like to avoid using FTP functions if I can.

 

Thanks for any help,

Joe