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?