File permissions error despite 777

Hi all,

I’m new to self-hosting on WordPress, and have been a regular (but light) user of the Unix command line (OS X and Linux) for little over 2 years. I have found several similar questions to this, but none which resolve the problem I will describe.

I am running the WordPress portion of my site on a virtual server (Linode) running Debian. I installed it and Apache myself following instructions from a different virtual server and, though I initially installed a couple of plug-ins, WordPress is not now able to self-update.

The update cannot be installed because we will be unable to copy some files

I have looked into this and found a number of on-line solutions involving file permissions and ownership. (I would categorise my comprehension of issues involving unix file permissions and ownership as being in the region of 60-80%. I have had a similar feeling for many other things I have solved in much shorter order.)

Ths following is a paste of my command line output.

[pocketapocketa]@[address]:/var/www/pocketapocketa.cz/public_html$ ls -l
total 188
-rwxrwxrwx  1 www-data www-data   418 Mar 29 13:10 index.php
-rwxr-sr-x  1 [pocketapocketa]  www-data 19930 Mar 29 13:10 license.txt
drwxr-sr-x 26 [pocketapocketa]  www-data  4096 Jun  1 15:44 Radical_transparency
-rwxr-sr-x  1 [pocketapocketa]  www-data  7195 Mar 29 13:10 readme.html
-rwxr-sr-x  1 [pocketapocketa]  www-data   781 Mar 29 14:10 static_frontpage.html
-rwxrwxrwx  1 www-data www-data  4951 Mar 29 13:10 wp-activate.php
drwxrwsrwx 10 www-data www-data  4096 May 10 15:44 wp-admin
-rwxrwxrwx  1 www-data www-data   271 Mar 29 13:10 wp-blog-header.php
-rwxrwxrwx  1 www-data www-data  5008 Mar 29 13:10 wp-comments-post.php
-rwxrwxrwx  1 www-data www-data  3110 Mar 29 13:46 wp-config.php
-rwxrwxrwx  1 www-data www-data  2726 Mar 29 13:10 wp-config-sample.php
drwxrwsrwx  6 www-data www-data  4096 Mar 29 13:48 wp-content
-rwxrwxrwx  1 www-data www-data  2956 Mar 29 13:10 wp-cron.php
drwxrwsrwx 12 www-data www-data  4096 Mar 29 13:10 wp-includes
-rwxrwxrwx  1 www-data www-data  2380 Mar 29 13:10 wp-links-opml.php
-rwxrwxrwx  1 www-data www-data  2714 Mar 29 13:10 wp-load.php
-rwxrwxrwx  1 www-data www-data 33435 Mar 29 13:10 wp-login.php
-rwxrwxrwx  1 www-data www-data  8252 Mar 29 13:10 wp-mail.php
-rwxrwxrwx  1 www-data www-data 11115 Mar 29 13:10 wp-settings.php
-rwxrwxrwx  1 www-data www-data 25152 Mar 29 13:10 wp-signup.php
-rwxrwxrwx  1 www-data www-data  4035 Mar 29 13:10 wp-trackback.php
-rwxr-sr-x  1 [pocketapocketa]  www-data  3032 Mar 29 13:10 xmlrpc.php

Some answers to similar problems mention FTP clients. Though I looked into Filezilla, I am pretty certain I have not successfully set one up.

The output above follows a couple of commands in which I set ownership of all WordPress-related files and directories to “www-data” and file permissions to 777. This is, of course, insecure. Previously I had not opened it so wide. I did this to check whether the answer to a previous question would resolve my particular problem. It did not.

Any help will be much appreciated,

Rob