note 86223 rejected from function.unlink by danbrown

Note Submitter: fritz at hoseanetworks dot com 

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I'm having the opposite problem with permissions from a lot of other people here.

In my case, I get a successful delete when I believe it should fail.

Apache is running as user "apache".  
The files are owned by user "root".
The files all have read only permissions "444".

Yet, unlink deletes the file successfully.

I don't understand it.  Can anyone help me with this one?

Here is the link of code:  
$result = ($item_type == "file") ? unlink($filename) : rmdir($filename);

Here is output from ps:
apache    1334  0.1  1.5  39272 16328 ?        S    07:25   0:04 /usr/sbin/httpd