Shell Programming and Scripting

I work as a website designer where I work on different directories on a server but my boss doesnt give me root permission for security reasons. So I have a temporary folder where I work and he copies the files over as he has root permission. The command he uses is usually like:

cp -fR /home/johndoe/public_html/websites/teachered/* /home/teachered/public_html/

And that updates the websites.

Is there a way a PHP script can be made where I just click it like a regular URL and it updates the Unix folders? A password field would also be nice, so the copy is made only if the password is correct.

thank you
Edtech

I searched the net and it looks something like the following is possible ?

<?
exec("cp -r /var/www/mysite /var/backup");
?>

It looks like I'd need to make different files for different folders. They would be lying in the root folder so the permissions would be there.

My next step is creating a password field. How do I pass the password from a textbox to the php environment? Then it would be something like:

<?
if ($password == "ThePassWord100") {
exec("cp -r /var/www/mysite /var/backup");
}
?>

Am I on the right track?
thanks!

If you need root permissions to copy them, it's not going to work. The web server probably has less access than you do.

You could ask your sysadmin to put you in a group with write-access to that folder, so you can copy yourslef...

He probably doesnt want to give me write-access, although I'll mention this to him.
So it wont copy even if the PHP file was copied in the root folder? The sysadmin would copy the file there and then I would call it from there in the browser. Wont work?

There's a php Copy command too, how about that?
thanks!

The effects of PHP copy and shell copy are just the same. Normally, the copy is effected with the user that is associated with the Web server, and at the end whether you can copy or not depends on the permissions and/or owner/group of the directories/files concerned.

But normally, the document root (e.g. /var/www) is created with root-only write privilege, so this is unlikely to work.