I've never done it personally, but off-hand (assuming that chmod 444 won't work) I'd suggest you may want to look into using sudo (for *nix). With sudo you could give the www user permission to become root only when executing that one command that writes to the file. You'd have to use a system call of course.
In case that's an appealing option, here's some info to get you started. http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2002/08/29/Big_Scary_Daemons.html?page=2 Of course the other option is simply to put the file in a protected directory, or to use some feature of your web-server such as Apache's .htaccess files or whathaveyou. That's how I do it. Anyway, good luck. > I am writing a perl CGI script on a remote server that is supposed to do the > following: > > 1. Have the user sign in with a username and password. > 2. Allow the user to add News Stories in which that input is taken and then > written to a text file (Which is as of this moment, set to chmod 777). > 3. Allow the user to edit or delete the news added. > > All of this works fine, but when I type in the address to the text file > where the news is stored, I can view it (Don't get me wrong, I know that > that's supposed to happen, 777 remember?). Does anyone know of a way, where > I can not allow ANYONE to view that text file, but still let the program > write to it? -- ===================== Shaun Fryer ===================== http://sourcery.ca/ ph: 905-529-0591 ===================== Science is like sex: occasionally something useful comes out of it, but that's not why we do it. -: Richard Feynmann -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]