Unix write permissions

Question

I recently configured by Ubuntu server for SFTP on my www directory.

Permissions 0755, and FileZilla would connect, however it said I didn't have write permissions and rejected my uploads.

I found that I forgot to sudo chown [myuser] www to remove the owner from being root.

That being said -- why was the root with the same permissions as the admin user rejecting uploads? Can you simply not remote access a directory owned by the root?

Answer 1

Cannot give definitive answer without knowing owning group of the file, but anyway:

Permissions 755 mean that file is writable by its owner and not-writable by others. So if file owner is root, only root can write it. If you connect with myuser (I assume, you have not stated that), you do not have write permissions.

Also note that any file is writable by root, no matter what the permissions are. So once the file is owned by myuser, keeping the same permissions, it is writable by both myuser and root.