[Wolves] PHP

[trig]

Hey guys :)

I wasn't sure what to put as the subject so I thought PHP was good enough. I 
've been asked to create a PHP UI for a system. Sounds easy enough, one of 
the hard things tho, is this.. I need to be able to read/write files 
contained in /etc
Seeing as most of these files are 'root' owned its gonna be hard for me to 
just
fopen("/path/to/file",a+);

Is there anyway that anyone knows of, that would allow me to read/write to 
these files without changing too much on the server side of things?

I looked into 
php.net/posix_setuid but I don't think that would work..

Thank you :)

trig