What's the best method for granting permission to a user to make changes to an area of a server? Say, for example, if I wanted to allow a user to add and delete files in my www directory and below.

It seems like I should just use chown, but not being familiar with chown and Linux I'm wondering if that would have unintended consequences.

The other route seems to involve creating a group and then using chown.

While most administrators would tell you that giving someone else write access anywhere inside your home directory isn't a great idea, it is possible. If you just use chown, the other user will have write access to the files/directories, but you won't. Instead, you need to create a group, add both your users to that group and use chgrp to assign the necessary files to that group (or chown with user:group).

Since you said you're not familiar with chown, I'm guessing you need a quick lesson in the octal numbers used for rights. You can find that on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_permissions

Hope that helps.

--James
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