Question

So, I set up a cronjob to run the following command:

php /var/www/path/to/cron/do-stuff.php

The path is correct. The directory is owned by www-data.

The script does the following:

chdir( getcwd() );
echo shell_exec('whoami');

$handle = fopen(uniqid('TEST_') . '.tst');
fwrite($handle, 'foo');
fclose($handle);

This is the output I get when trying to run the cron job:

www-data
PHP Warning:  fopen(TEST_4e15266d09fa2.tst): failed to open stream: Permission denied

Yet when doing this from shell with su www-data — the script executes just fine and produces the test file without a hiccup.

Any idea why this might be?

EDIT: I guess the su www-data is probably unnecessary, because php will run however it runs, but I tried that just in case. The cron and script is executed as www-data though, as you can see from the output.

Answer 1

Have you tried putting the full path in the fopen function instead of just the filename?