PHP: confused about file permissions, cannot unlink setup file?

Question

I created a setup.php to handle MySQL table generation, and as an obvious precaution I added a way to delete it after it was finished. As using unlink(__FILE__) is impossible to do, I added deletion code to main.php?action=deleteconfig to unlink the file.

setup.php has permissions 777, but it gives me a permission denied error when I unlink it.. My directory is drwxr-xr-x and my main.php is -rw-r--r--.

Would I need to set main.php to 777 as well before it can delete setup.php ? I am confused about file permissions here and why they do not work.

Answer 1

The user running php needs to have write permissions for the directory in order to modify its contents (ie. delete/create). so you could chown the directory to the php user, or add the php user to the group and chmod the directory to so that the group ha w permissions.