Good evening,

After playing with umask, chmod and chgrp for about an hour and half I have finally given up and am asking for some help.

This is what I have:

/var/www/* owned by www-data, group set to tim and permissions set to 775
or:
drwxrwxr-x www-data tim www


Now when I create a directory under /var/www/ say images, it gets the following permissions:

/var/www/images/* owned by tim, group set to tim and permissions set to 755
or:
drwxr-xr-x tim tim images

I then create a file in the /var/www directory, say index.php, it gets the following permissions:

/var/www/index.php owned by tim, group set to tim, permissions set to 644
or:
-rw-r--r-- tim tim index.php

How do I FORCE the directory of /var/www so that ANYTHING (file or folder) created underneath it by anyone of any group or any username is set to:

owned by www-data, group set to tim, permissions set to 775
drwxrwxr-x

Setting the umask won't cut it because that does every file and only sets permissions not users and groups.....

Surely there has to be someway to specify the default user and group for files under a folder as well as their permissions...?

If there is a way of doing that, I'd be happy to know about it. One way I know of setting perms is to use find. To take your case as an example:

cd /var/www
find html -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \+
find html -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \+

That changes permissions on all dirs under and including html to 775. File perms get changed to 664 (I don't advise putting exe perms on files when you don't need to).

Then to change ownership of all files under html:

chown -R tim.www-data html

Where "tim" is the user, "www-data" is the group, "html" is the directory.

Surely you can put these commands in an alias to automate the task.

alias wwwp="find /tmp/test -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \+ && find /tmp/test -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \+ && chown -R tim.www-data /tmp/test"

To build an alias like that, the trick is to write lines separately in an editor, to test them separately and then to combine them into an alias.

Cheers!