Well, you could run the following at the command prompt as your user, it does use Perl after all ;)

perl -e ' $apache = qx(ps -ef | grep httpd); @fields=split /\s+/, $apa
+che; 
exec ("chown $fields[0] /path/to/flat/file/directory");'
[download]

However setting up a directory with write permission for the uid of the web service directly makes more sense from a certainty of action and security perspective