Directory permission help

Hi,

I have a directory that my php script uploads images to etc and the the database has links to the images.

But i have to make the directory 777 to let my script upload the images from the web.

First: am i doing something wront there or does it need to be writeable for public.

Second: I would like that directoy set so you can't look at it and see all images in there etc so what permission should i give it so my script can write to it but the world can't see it.

Thanks

Change ownership(chown) of the directory to that of the user that the webserver runs as. Could be 'nobody' or 'www' or anything else.

wouldnt that be the root user...

No I hope your not running the server as root. In redhat mine runs as 'apache'

Sorry to be lame as a developer I have not set up this server or know too much about it. How do I tell who it is running as, my friend who set it up is also not 100%

Thanks
Trent

What OS are you under, and what webserver & versions?

One way is to look in your httpd.conf file is should be located somewhere around
/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Look in the user/group section you'll see something like this
User apache
Group apache