victor at nobel dot com dot br wrote that
the correct dirpath format excluded "/home/USER/" from the public path, but for my server, i had to use it in order to get my scripts to work.
it may be obvious to most but I'm positing that you cannot use the $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] path since FTP starts at your top-level and therefore bypasses (or just plain doesn't recognize) most of the virtual server pathing.