Is there a way to make files in a compressed archive writeable after extraction?

Unless I’m misunderstanding, you could use chmod() in PHP to modify the file permissions after extracting them.

http://uk.php.net/chmod

Although I haven’t done this either, I’d use chmod($filename, 0755) which is read and write for owner, read and execute for others.

But wouldn’t you already need write permissions before you can change the permissions?

And I can set the permissions to 755 before archiving them, but how do I know the owner is the same user as the one the PHP script is executing as?

I’m not sure about all that permission stuff actually, maybe google it a bit. But I do know you can (through PHP) change a file’s permissions no matter what your “status” is.

That’d be very handy but concerning at the same time (if PHP could circumvent the filesystem permissions). The PHP website says:

> The current user is the user under which PHP runs.
> It is probably not the same user you use for normal shell or FTP access.
> The mode can be changed only by user who owns the file on most systems.

I wonder who “owns” the files :p

It’ll be whatever the web server is running under which varies from OS to OS (including between distros) some don’t even run it under a user just to be safe :)

@Skyrail – hmm, on my local Apache installation it’s www-data. Is this the default for all Apache installations? If so, that’d be a reasonable target, with instructions for people that do not use Apache on Linux on updating the permissions.

I would using chmod() would be the right approach. Relying on the files to be in a writable state after another process has been at them seems likely to cause problems. Why not just set the permissions you need on the fly?

Ah, that’s an idea: I set the permissions to 777 before extraction and then make them 755 when the script is run. Thanks! :)

It depends really, I see you’ve found a good way to do it though and I like that way :)

Yeah, now I just need to find out how to get Phing to preserve file permissions when tarring ;-)

Can you just run “regular” tar by tripping a shell command with shell_exec()?

I could get it to execute shell commands, though I’d prefer using built-in support. Unfortunately, it depends on a PEAR module for tarring that doesn’t support permissions yet (as noted in the Phing source code).

However, I just extracted the generated archive (so without permissions explicitly set) and uploaded them with FTP, and my script could perfectly well edit the files, so I guess I’m satisfied :)