Linux – How to delete a directory you don’t own in an NFS directory you do

There is no way to do this out of the box. If you're only going to be doing it rarely, the manual process of denying on the parent folders is going to be most efficient.

If, however, this is a task you think you'll find yourself repeating fairly often, you can create a utility using the TFS API to do it for you.

(Something along these lines. Warning, this is not tested)

vcs = //...VersionControlServer reference...

string checkinPath = @"$/MyProject/Sources/Whatever";
string identityName = @"[MyProject]\Contributors";
string[] removesNone = new string[]{ };    
string[] allowsNone = new string[]{ };
string[] deniesNone = new string[]{ };
string[] allowsCheckin = new string[]{ PermissionChange.ItemCheckin };
string[] deniesCheckin = new string[]{ PermissionChange.ItemCheckin };


PermissionChange pc = new PermissionChange(
    checkinPath, identityName, allowsCheckin, deniesNone, removesNone);

vcs.SetPermissions(new SecurityChange[]{ pc } );

// walk up the path denying on parent folders
checkinPath = checkinPath.Substring(0, checkinPath.LastIndexOf('/'));
while (checkinPath.Length > 2)
{
        PermissionChange pc = new PermissionChange(
            checkinPath, identityName, allowsNone, deniesCheckin, removesNone);

        vcs.SetPermissions(new SecurityChange[]{ pc } );

        checkinPath = checkinPath.Substring(0, checkinPath.LastIndexOf('/'));
}

You're on the right track by adding the www-user to the ftp-group. Unfortunately, the files you're creating don't have the group write permissions set. So only the owner (ftp-user) is able to write/delete them. You need to have those files created with write permissions for the group (ftp-group) as well. (This would be rw-rw-r-- instead of rw-r--r--)

The default permissions for new files are controlled via something called umask. Pure-FTP supports a umask directive within its configuration file. Essentially, you'll want to enter umask 113:003 into the configuration file, or -U 113:003 on the command line, to get the correct permissions.