We have an ongoing problem here at work. We have a lot of websites set up on shared hosts, our cms writes many files to these sites and allows users of the sites to upload files etc..

The problem is that when a user uploads a file on the site the owner of that file becomes the webserver and therefore prevents us being able to change permissions etc via FTP.

There are a few work arounds, but really what we need is a way to set a sticky owner if that's possible on new files and directories that are created on the server. Eg, rather than php writing the file as user apache it takes on the owner of the parent directory.

I'm not sure if this is possible (I've never seen it done.) Any ideas?

We're obviously not going to get a login for apache to the server, and I doubt we could get into the apache group either.

Perhaps we need a way of allowing apache to set at least the group of a file, that way we could set the group to our ftp user in php and set 664 and 775 for any files that are written?

Cheers, John.