@JordonBiondo but only because it's impossible...

3 weeks since someone last replied to a chat message in this room!

Tramp makes the impossible possible

And 2 days into the election nomination period, nobody's nominating

@JordonBiondo no, not with only FTP access

he needs shell access

True, but OP said he putty's in to do the chown

so he has that

Hmmm, I don't usually use Emacs for file management, but I can't think of another tool that can do file transfers and remote chown through the same interface

sshfs could do it, but it would mean running as root on the client and on the server

Tramp+Dired is a great ssh/scp front end. M-x copy-file works great for uploads, downloads. M-x shell-command from a remote dired buffer could be used for sudo chown. Or just M-x shell

@JordonBiondo Can't you do the sudo chown from a remote dired buffer? If you can't, then it isn't a unified interface

there's a dired function for doing chown, not sure if you can use sudo. However dired has support for marking multiple files and running each through a shell command, so that would suffice for sudo chown

however I wouldn't suggest any of this to someone without prior emacs experience.