root admin
root can do anything, so obviously youre not root.
this is common enough — some code or a script altering permissions enough that the owner of the file(s) is restricted from doing things. The fix is to get your host, who does have root, to change the permissions back.
Given that I specifically said that I had been logged in as root, I think that pretty much eliminates that end of the advice. But thanks for trying.
Any other suggestions?
lol, well if you were root then you can certainly chmod a file then, cant you? chmod 666 on a file allows ANYONE to do anything to do ANYTHING to it
chmod’ing a directory to 777 does the same thing (for directories).
— and that pretty much contradicts what you wrote above.
and maybe, just maybe you ought to read the man page for chattr
I am having the same problem with file permissions. I am on a VPS and logging in as the account owner on cPanel and trying the file manager there does not help. I need to go to the Power Panel as root to get rid of the offending files, haven’t tried SSH yet but it may work as well.
The problem also comes up when I use the WordPress automatic plugin updater. FTP will not remove or chmod the files even though I can edit them in the built-in plugin editor.
My hosts support provided the following information:
PHP is compiled as Apache module in the VPS. This will cause PHP to run as ‘nobody’ user and PHP scripts are able to write only to directories with complete write permission. That is why the files/directories need 777 permissions to execute.
I can see that permissions need to be looser for the VPS but how can a plugin or a built-in part of WordPress lock these files so that FTP can’t be used to change them?
The problem is that you can’t chmod on FTP as the account owner and you can’t have a root enabled FTP account. What else can be done to fix this?
The problem seem to be that the scripts are setting owner to “nobody”. This effectively disables the usefullness of automatic upgrades and there should be a way around it.
If you have a working setup and upgrade a plugin, it will delete the old plugin. When the script puts the new version in place, the files will be registered with “nobody” as owner, resulting in a huge problem for anyone that do not have access to root. This is of course the majority of the people out there…
That’s a matter of how your webserver is setup. WordPress runs as the same user your webserver runs as, it can’t choose who that is.
Look into “suPHP”.
Yep you can ask your hosting to enable suexec/suphp if you have problems with file permissions.
