root running cron task can't read .txt file generated by www-data user - linux

Question

I have a simple php page that writes a file to my server.
// open new file
$filename = "$name.txt";
$fh = fopen($filename, "w");
fwrite($fh, "$name".";"."$abbreviation".";"."$uid".";");
fclose($fh);
I then have a cron job that I know runs as root as test that and need that.
if [[ $EUID -ne 0 ]]; then
echo "This script must be run as root" 1>&2
exit 1
fi
The cronjob is a bash script that can detect the file exists, but it can't seem to read the contents of the file.
#!/bin/bash
######################################################
#### Loop through the files and generate coincode ####
######################################################
for file in /home/test/customcoincode/queue/*
do
echo $file
chmod 777 $file
echo "read file"
while read -r coinfile; do
echo $coinfile
echo "Assign variables from file"
#############################################
#### Set the variables to from the file #####
#############################################
coinName=$(echo $coinfile | cut -f1 -d\;)
coinNameAbreviation=$(echo $coinfile | cut -f2 -d\;)
UId=$(echo $coinfile | cut -f3 -d\;)
done < $file
echo "`date +%H:%M:%S` - $coinName : Your Kryptocoin is being compiled!"
echo $file
echo "copy $coinName file to generated directory"
cp -b $file /home/test/customcoincode/generatedCoins/$coinName.txt
echo "`date +%H:%M:%S` : Delete queue file"
# rm -f $file
done
echo $file recognises the file exists
echo $coinfile is blank
Yet when I nano ./coinfile.txt in terminal I can see clearly there is text in there
I run ls -l and I see that the file has the permissions
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data
I was under the impression that this would still mean the file can be read by other users?
Do I need to be able to execute the file if i am opening it and reading the contents?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I can expand and show my code if you want, but it was working before when I called a bash script to write the file... and that time it would save the file under root user with rwx for most and then could be read. But this then caused other issues in the php page, so is not an option.

Answer 1

You have:
while read -r coinfile; do
...
I see no indication that you're reading from $file. The command
read -r coinfile
will simply read from standard input (the -r merely affects the treatment of backslashes). In a cron job, if I recall correctly, standard input is empty or unavailable, which would explain why $coinfile is empty.
If you actually do read from $file -- for example, if your real code looks something like:
while read -r coinfile; do
...
done <$file
then you need to show us your entire script, or at least a self-contained version of it that exhibits the problem. Actually, you need to show us your entire script whether that's the problem or not.
http://sscce.org/