An example: Say Apache needs to have ownership of all the files in /var/www/html to serve the pages of a website. Is there any danger in making Apache the owner of this directory (and files and sub-directories), rather than just assigning ownership to the files and maintaining the current directory ownership? It seems like a less precise solution, and less precise solutions always seem to be insecure for reasons I haven't thought of.
It's basically a question of using
cd /var/www/html
chown -R user .
Versus
chown -R user /var/www/html
Thank you!