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Everybody knows what a file is, right? Well, we all know intuitively what a file might be, but we seldom know what exactly it is. A file is actually consisted of at least two parts. The first part is the file data, what we intuitively understand as the file contents. The second part is the file system entry, which makes the file data an identifiable entity. This is where the operating system stores all kinds of information, such as how the file is named, where it is located in the file system hierarchy, when it was modified, etc. It also contains information about who owns the files and what are the file's permissions. You might be surprised reading this, but only this latter, informative, part is required for a file. Really!

It seems absurd to have a file without file data, but it is anything but that. There are some special "files" (more correctly: file system entries) in the UNIX world. You have devices, whose "files" actually point to a serial input/output provided by this device, for example the serial port of your computer. There are directories, which obviously don't have any data contained; they are used for organising files only. There are soft links, which are pointers to other files in the file system, used to have standardised names and locations on files which might be moved around or have varying names. There are also these wired beasts called "hard links", some peculiar file system entries which point to the file data of another file, making virtually impossible to know which is the "original" file and which is its clone. Their usefulness is only apparent to the UNIX gurus, therefore out of the scope of this document. For the purpose of website management we are only concerned about regular files (hereby called "files"), directories and soft links (hereby called "links").

All files, directories and links are owned by a user and a group, be they files or links. In fact, they are owned by a user ID and a group ID. Normally, the ownership is inherited by the creating process's ownership. When you create a file directly from an interactive editor application the editor's process is owned by your user ID and your default group ID, therefore the file will be owned by your user ID and your default group ID.

Links are a special case on their own. They are not files, they are pointer to files. The ownership (and permissions) of links is irrelevant. Whenever a process tries to access a link, the underlying operating system "follows" the link, until it finds a regular file. Therefore, the ownership that matters is that of the file linked to, not the link itself. This feature of the operating system prevents unauthorised access to arbitrary files, normally accessible to specific users only, from users who just happen to know the path to those files.

What is especially interesting is the correlation between FTP, web server and file ownership. Whenever you access FTP, you log in as some user. This user is linked to a system user (often the same user assigned to you by host), so logging in FTP actually has the same effect as logging into the system as this user. Common sense implies that all file operations are performed under this user and all files created (read: uploaded) through FTP will be owned by this user.

Conversely, whenever you are using a web interface to perform file operations, you are using a web application - or any PHP script/application for that matter - running on the web server whose process is owned by a different user. Therefore, whenever you create files from a web application, they will be owned by the user the web server runs under.

The distinction of file ownership in these two cases is of paramount importance when you get stuck with files which are accessible to FTP but inaccessible to the web server, or vice versa. This minute distinction is the cause of a lot of grief to many webmasters, so beware!