Why the folder ownership is "nobody"..?

1

why the ownership is set to ‘nobody’ for dynamicaly created folders

I am using the following command to copy the folders;

The ‘$from’ folder have ownership that is not “nobody” and have 777 permision also.
$cmd = cp -rp $from $to;

And when I use the following command to find out the owner of the file which is included the above copy script.

exec("whoami",$err);
echo "<br>";print_r($err);    

then this display 

Array ( [0] => nobody )

But the files also have ownership that is not  'nobody'

what may be the problem. plesssssssssss help me.

Thanks in advance…