Hi Everyone,
I have a question about permissions

Is it possible to somehow setup a directory so that anything put in it will have the same permissions? Sometimes I put stuff in my public_html directory and the permissions are weird. I would like to make them consistent, if possible, without having to chmod every time I upload files.

Thanks in advance for your help,

what you can do is use the setgid bit. man chmod.

just as an example:

find ./public_html -type d -exec chgrp www-data {} \;
find ./public_html -type d -exec chmod g+ws {} \;

I'm not sure what group you want to set.

Instead of cp, you could scp them to localhost:/targetdir as the target user eliminating the step to change their ownership.

I'm not sure if that's what you're asking for.