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Accepted
Daniel Kaplan
Asked: 2018-09-20 17:16:42 +0800 CST

Can I give the default user that runs Perl scripts from cgi-bin different permisions?

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The default user that Perl scripts run from browsers is www-data. My scripts need permission to read/write/delete files in other directories. All these directories are created within the /home directory (all recursive, i.e. /home/Daniel/ftp/files) and these directories and files are created at run time by different users.

Is there a way to give www-data broader authority? Should I change the default user that runs Perl scripts (again from browsers) even though that sounds dangerous?

Thanks

permissions xubuntu perl cgi

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Should anyone come across this I found my answer.

    The default user (for Perl/CGI commands) is located in /etc/apache2/envvars

    I commented the line out 

    #export APACHE_RUN_USER=www-data

    Replaced it with the user I wanted

    export APACHE_RUN_USER=franklin

    then after saving the file I restarted the service

    sudo service apache2 restart

    I should note that even though I am sure it would have been the wrong thing to do, trying to make the default user 'root' produced an error.

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