This seems to be the purpose of Unix groups — give the users membership in a "dbmwrite" group that owns the DBM files but does not have write permission in the directory holding the DBM files, which prevents accidental deletion of the files because unlink(2) requires write permission on the containing directory. A close variant of this is to set the sticky bit on the directory containing the DBM files and have the files themselves owned by a service account but with read/write permissions for the "dbmwrite" group. (chown dbmservice:dbmwrite file.dbm)

You could also look into using POSIX ACLs to grant access to the DBM files to the user accounts that need it.

In reply to Re: Setuid vs. Web Server by jcb
in thread Setuid vs. Web Server by Anonymous Monk

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