For all of you coders out there, I just found a new best friend, its name is chmod().  For those of you familiar with Unix/Linux this command will look familiar.

Background: I was implementing an online store for a customer who already had an existing website, but wanted to be able to sell her goods online (I’m trying to keep things vague on purpose when describing the website).  I built her a custom content management system for her online store that allowed her to upload pictures of her goods and input pricing data.  My code would take the image she uploaded, save it, then copy it and resize the copy to make a thumbnail image.  For whatever reason though, her web host was locking down permissions on the first file.  This became problematic because it doesn’t do any good to have a file that you can’t read…

Solution: After using the move_uploaded_file() command I used the chmod() command to reset the file permissions.

Here is the format of the chmod() function: chmod($filename , $mode );

I also ran into a gotcha that I didn’t expect…when specifying the mode, do not specify it as a string, (ie. “755″), instead you specify it as a number (ie. 755), even further though, you have to throw in a leading zero (ie. 0755).

Hopefully, you found this post helpful, happy coding.