One possible reason is that one of the directories that the file is in doesn't allow the web server to access the file (for example if /home/jma is 750 the story ends here).

Another is Security-Enhanced Linux which assigns a "context" to each process, and Apache has the "www" context. It can't access files that don't have that context, and /home/ doesn't. Selinux is enabled by default on Red Hat distributions and those that are based on it (like CentOS).

In reply to Re^3: cgi script write to crontab by moritz
in thread how to avoid web server from getting hacked by Niner710

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