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Can anyone point me to either code or a tutorial for writing a shell script that can recursively go through an entire directory structure (starting at the current working directory, or given an required argument of where to start at) and can:

  1. Determine whether an item is a directory, and if it is, chmod 755 it, or...
  2. Determine whether an item is a file (not a dir), and chmod 644 it.

I'm looking for compatibility with Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL-Based, etc., so I'm not tagging this with any particular language. I'd like this in Bash, but if you have a ZSH script, that will work also.

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
10

I am used to this one-line command (will recurse starting in current working directory)

find . -type d -exec chmod 0755 '{}' + -or -type f -exec chmod 0644 '{}' +

Explanation:

find .                    # starting in curdir find   
-type d                   # any directory
-exec chmod 0755 '{}'     # and chmod it to 755
+                         # (variant of -exec look find man page)
-or                       # or
-type f                   # any file
-exec chmod 0644 '{}'     # and chmod it to 644
+                         # (as above)
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5
  • That worked. I take it if I do this in a script, and I set a cd /path/to/dir/ it will change the working directory, so I can use it as an argument-based command/script?
    – Thomas Ward
    Jun 17, 2012 at 0:12
  • I just tested and cd does appear to change the working directory in a script. Not sure if there are any exceptions to that, though.
    – user19866
    Jun 17, 2012 at 1:15
  • @palintropos cd does change the working directory in scripts. If that has ever not happened for you, that's quite strange. You might want to post a new question about that ...with details.
    – Eliah Kagan
    Jun 17, 2012 at 2:28
  • @palitropos in your script you can just pass the topmost directory to find instead of .
    – guido
    Jun 17, 2012 at 3:16
  • 1
    Tiny nitpick: this would be a fully portable solution with -o instead of -or (a GNUism, same applies to -and).
    – ormaaj
    Jun 17, 2012 at 8:30
3

The simple answer:

chmod -R a+rX .

+X (note the capital X) means to give the execute permission if the execute permission was already present for some user. If you have a directory tree which has the right permissions for the owner and you want to make it accessible to everyone, this is the right command to use. It not only makes directories world-executable, but also executable files.

If you also want to reset write permissions to owner only and clear any setuid/setgid bit, make that

chmod -R a-ws,u+w,a+rX .

The obligatory zsh two-liner, if you don't want to make any file executable:

chmod 755 **/*(/)
chmod 644 **/*(.)
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