Is there any way i can make /opt world readable and make sure these permissions stick to all subfolders and not allow users other than root/sudo to change them?
Make it a seperate filesystem mounted read-only, then remount it rw when you need to make changes.
i cant as the applications need to log there - i just need 'everyone' to be able to read there - i would have thought i could somehow stick the read permissions but it seems that perhaps not.