<reference type="comedy" act="Abbot and Costello">I thought he was playing centerfield ... </reference> =)

Actually, there is a user called 'nobody', in the sense that there's an entry for such in /etc/passwd on your system (I assume you're running some *nix-like OS). It's there to provide an unprivileged userID for daemons (like webservers) to run under. If you set the permissions on the files and group membership of nobody appropriately, you shouldn't have a problem.

I imagine that you're talking about CGI scripts? Another possibility is that the script is owned by nobody and set to run with the permissions of that user. If you feel like you MUST give ownership of the files it creates to other people, you have a couple options:

• run the scripts under a regular user's name (suEXEC does this w/Apache, or unset the setuid bit)
• have a cron job (running with root's privileges) change ownership of the files periodically

I'd prefer to do the second anyway, as it's pretty easy to add other maintenance (e.g. backup) functions to the cron job; also, if you don't already have the suEXEC like mechanism in place already it's just easier to implement.

HTH!

perl -e 'print "How sweet does a rose smell? "; chomp ($n = <STDIN>); 
+$rose = "smells sweet to degree $n"; *other_name = *rose; print "$oth
+er_name\n"'
[download]

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