A perl program runs under the user "project". The program grabs a small flatfile and updates a value in it.

The problem is, sometimes, like maybe 1 out of 10 times, it changes that little flatfile's ownership to "root". I am baffled by this, and really don't know why this is happening. There is nothing in the code that changes permissions or ownership. But for it to be something that happens occasionally, it is hard to troubleshoot. I hope someone can shed some light on this. My theory is that maybe apache restarts and the cgi runs just at the split second before suExec starts up...?

This is on Red Hat Linux, with Apache 1.3.31, running suExec