I am trying finally figure out linux file permissions.

my goal is to move a dev web server off apache/windows and on to a linux box.

i have 3 dev sites e.g. test.com test2.com test3.com all of wich i placed in /var/www
now i set up a few users that have access to /var/www so they can all make changes to the sites.

they all use ftp to make the changes. so i added them to a group called "dev" and jailed the group dev into /var/www in the proftpd.conf

i then issued
chown :dev /var/www/* -r
and
chmod 775 /var/www/* -r

so that the users could make changes to all files in /var/www

however i noticed if i ftp in as user1 and create a directory let say /var/www/test.com/newdir that another user cannot delete that directory or make changes inside it. unless the first user manually sets the chmod permissions through ftp.

my web dev users are dumb. can i get around this some how with out manually issuing chmod commands all the time? Or am i not going about this in the right way?


thanks for any help

I would say you need to reconfigure your proftpd to make sure the files are being uploaded as with the right group and mask.

i found an area to specify the umask on each file or folder upload. wich helps. however i would really like be able to specify wich group the file/folder gets assigned.

so if any file uploaded automatically gets a group id of DEV
as of right now its user1:user1 for each file/folder that user1 uploads

anyone?

I do hope those are typos: according to the man pages at www.die.net, chown & chmod do not have '-r' switch. Did you actually use that or '-R' (recursive)?

Can you do a

ls -lR

on those dirs?