Best practices in LINUX?

[aparsons]

I have CFMX 7.02 running on ubuntu. It is running as the default user, NOBODY,
and I'm experiencing alot of security headaches. I need access to write files
and execute scripts (cfexecute), but the nobody user doesnt have access to run
"echo" or "cat". My question is:

Is it safe to run the coldfusion server as a user (i.e. CFMX) who belongs to
an os group (i.e. USERS)?

If not, how can I safely allow the nobody user to execute commands such as
/bin/cat and /bin/ls?

Thanks for your help.

[fuzed]

For what it's worth, I run CFMX as the 'apache' user and have no security issues.