How to copy files into `/var/www` with WinSCP

Instead of always having to run "gksudo nautilus", lets try something easier

My www folder is not owned by root but by me, I want to be admin of the www folder, and I suppose you want the same.

So we're going to make you owner

sudo chown <your_username> <path of your www folder> -R

In my case it was

sudo chown jeffrey /var/www/ -R

This will make you the owner of the folder, -R means recursive, thus it will make you owner of all subfolders as well.

To make sure you got enough read and write rights

sudo chmod 755 <path of your www folder> -R

This will grant you read, write and execute rights, and it will grant other users the right to read and execute it, 744 won't work, because you'll get a "permission denied" error.

That is a protected folder. You need to be root in order to modify this directory.

You can also make gab the owner of this directory by doing

sudo chown -R gab /var/www

sudo will execute the chown -R gab /var/www command as a root (administrator) and prompt you for your password used when setting up the system (most likely the same password as gab).

Once you do this, you can also do

sudo chown -R 755 /var/www

to give write permissions.

#   Permission
7   full
6   read and write
5   read and execute
4   read only
3   write and execute
2   write only
1   execute only
0   none


Reference   Class   Description
u   user    the owner of the file
g   group   users who are members of the file's group
o   others  users who are not the owner of the file or members of the group

The 755 means that the user will have full access, group will have read and execute access and others will have read and execute access.