ssh - Change permission of files with the owner 'apache'

Hay, i have some files on my server with the owner set to "apache", I'm not quite sure how this happened.

Anyway, i need to change the permission of these files to 0777 so i can download/edit them. However i cannot.

I'm using a 1and1 Linux server and use Plesk to administrate it.

I have the ability to login via SSH. However, if i run chmod or chown i get a "permission denied" error, and if i try to sudo chmod or chown it says the command cannot be found.

When i go to edit my domain details, i get this option

Shell access to server with FTP user's credentials

and have these options

/bin/sh
/bin/bash
/sbin/nologin
/bin/bash (chrooted)
/bin/rbash

Any idea's how i should go about changing the permissions or changing the owner?

Thanks

Answer

Use php's chmod function.

chmod("/somedir/somefile", 0777);
?>

also you can also use shell_exec function

echo shell_exec("chmod 777 /somedir/somefile");
?>