find files with -perm and change perms

Question

I need to find all files in a directory where “other” have permissions to read, write, or execute, and I need to apply those permission to “group”.

Example: if file1 has rwxr--rw-, this would change it to rwxrw-rw-.

But in the case that “group” has permissions but “other” doesn’t, I need to leave it as is.

I need to use one command for this with no pipes.

Any tips you can help me with?

Answer 1

In hint form, since this is an assignment:

We can check whether a specific group and other permission is different with the following find syntax:

\( -perm -o=PERMISSION -not -perm -g=PERMISSION \)

Since there are eight different possibilities you'll need eight of these to match all differences.

Once you have these files you can use -exec COMMAND {} \; to run COMMAND for each file.

chmod is the command to change the permissions.

Now, how you'd actually copy the permissions from other to group without running another command is a bit of a conondrum.

Answer 2

The command I used to solve my problem was :

find ./directory/ -perm /o=rwx -execdir chmod g+o {} +

Thanks again for the help, @l0b0 and @steeldriver!