Internal Server Error / Premature end of script headers

Reinstalled PHP and now scripts won't work

[roldar]

I reinstalled PHP today but now all my .php scripts are broken. I receive an Internal Server Error (500). The logs only give the additional information: "Premature end of script headers."

I did a lot of searching around, and most recommendations were to check the permissions of my files. I used chmod to change some of my php files to 777 to test them, but it still didn't work.

The solution turned out to be that I had to chown all my files from root:root to ftpuser:ftpuser for each website on my box. This is causing serious hassle, as I uploaded every one of my files using root (they're all owned by root).

This happened to me once before when I was with a managed host, and they were able to change some setting without having to change all the ownerships. Is there some simple way I can fix apache (or is it a PHP problem?) so that it will run root-owned files in the respective users' WWW folders?

I know that I can use the -R flag to change all ownerships at once, but I'd really rather have things as they were so I don't have to change the ownerships every time I upload a new file. I only have one shell account and I don't want to upload my files via unsecured FTP in order to have the permissions set "properly" for files I upload.

Any help is much appreciated.