Cross post eliminated... Mario Bianchi wrote at 2003-1-27 14:24 +0000:

I'm curious in finding out how zope interacts with the server's file system: let's say I want to allow the users of my site to manage (read/write) their own files on the server's file system, does Zope support this goal anyhow? No, for several reasons:

* In order to switch users dynamically, Zope would need to run as root. This is a very bad idea for a powerful Web server like Zope with a connection to the dangerous internet... * The user is a property of the process and not its individual threads. Heavy locking would be necessary to synchronize switching between users.

As far as I've seen, to me the response seems to be no, it doesn't! The only way to access the server's file system from zope seems to be using the ExternalFile product, which is far from satisfactory from the point of view of file access rights: it only allows access to files owned by zope itself (or in the same group of zope's). No way to access 'someuser''s files with the uid of 'someuser'? Right, unless you run Zope as root, switch users dynamically and ensure, threads are not switched while Zope runs as a special user.

Forget about it, unless you really know what you are doing... Or give each user its own Zope process... Dieter