Ok, I guess I'm still not clear, but let me take a stab at it.
If you're manually editing the descriptions.txt file, it'll have permissions such that you (as a user) can read/write it.
When you use the album.pl?function=enter_desc feature, it runs under the web server. The server runs as a specifiic user on your system, and the descriptions.txt file will be created as that user, and readable/writable for that user. On UNIX/Linux, web servers often run as "nobody" and on NT/2000 they usually run as "iusr_hostname." This is done so that the web server data is protected, but more importantly so that the web server cannot access sensitive information on the OS.
Now there are circumstances where you (as a user) will not be able to read things created by the web server user, and vice versa.
Not sure if this is along the lines of what you're thinking... Does it make sense?
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