Thread: SFTP, GEdit, file permissions and owner changed!

Hi,

I'm using Ubuntu 11.04 to access a server via SFTP in Nautilus. If I open a PHP file and then save it, the permissions and owner are modified!

For example, if I have /var/www/index.php on my server (192.168.1.2) and I do the following:

1. Open Nautilus.
2. Press CTRL + L.
3. In the address bar enter: sftp://192.168.1.2/var/www/
4. Double click on index.php to open it with GEdit.
5. Make some changes to index.php.
6. Save index.php.

the result is the permissions for index.php are modified, and the owner is changed from www-data to my username.

Is there any way to preserve the original owner of the file and file permissions?

Thanks in advance.

You are saving files locally, aren't you? You need to share 192.168.1.2 via nfs and mount it locally. Once done you can directly edit required files and save them.

Originally Posted by nixcraft

You are saving files locally, aren't you? You need to share 192.168.1.2 via nfs and mount it locally. Once done you can directly edit required files and save them.

Sorry for the late reply. Using a mount isn't what I'm after. I want to be able to preserve the permissions (more precisely, just the group permissions) if I open a file in Nautilus and edit/save it. For example:

A file exists on some.server.net: /var/www/index.php.
The owner:group for index.php is john:www-data, and the permissions are 774.

1. Open Nautilus.
2. Press CTRL + L.
3. In the address bar, enter: sftp://some.server.net/var/www
4. Enter credentials for 'john'.
5. Double click on the file (index.php) to open it.
6. Make some changes to the file.
7. Save the file.

The result of the above is the group and the permissions of index.php will be altered. What I want (and expect) is for the owner and permissions to remain the same.

Is there any way to do this?

Have you tried to modify the file with FileZilla or some other client, that supports SFTP? Also, could you execute the following commands and give us the results:

1) cd /var/www/ ; ls -alh | grep index.php

2) start index.php

Also, try to chmod the index.php file to 0644, and check if there is going to be a change after that.