[ALUG] The 'nobody' user in HTML and CGI, how to best use it?

[cl at isbd.net]

I mostly understand why there is a user 'nobody' who owns all the HTML
and CGI stuff in the /var/www hierarchy.

However it's a bit of a pain maintaining the 'nobody' file ownership
permissions there, how do other people manage this?   At present I
tend to do things as root and then 'chown -R nobody' which is a bit
clumsy really.

This is on a home system with me being the only direct user (and a few
other samba file sharing users).  I edit and move files around in
/var/www directly as I'm really the only user most of the time and the
occasional 'outside' user can just put up with anything I break for a
while.

The problem is that one has to be root to manipulate the files owned
by nobody as one can't actually become nobody.  Ooh, just tried and
one *can* become nobody via root, I suppose that's one way to deal
with it.

So, is that what others do when doing things to files in the /var/www
area, su to root and then to nobody?

-- 
Chris Green (chris at halon.org.uk)