16 December 2009Recursive chmod distinguishing files from folders
Version 3
An even better method is:
1 2 | find "$target" -type f -exec chmod -c "$mode_files" {} \; \ -or -type d -exec chmod -c "$mode_dir" {} \; |
A true one-liner! 
Version 2
A better method is this:
1 2 | find "$target" -type f -exec chmod -c "$mode_files" {} \; find "$target" -type d -exec chmod -c "$mode_dir" {} \; |
This one can also be used from the command line.
Version 1
Many times I needed to apply certain permissions recursively on a given path but with different permissions on files than on directories (i.e. I want 0644 for files and 0744 for directories). This behaviour is not provided by the chmod tool so here is a simple and effective bash function to do just that:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 | # Recursively apply chmod to path. # If mode_files is missing then apply mode_dir to files too. # Params: target mode_dir [mode_files] function deep_chmod() { function _walk() { local F for F in `find "$1"`; do local M="$3"; [[ `file -b "$F"` == "directory" ]] && M="$2" chmod -c "$M" "$F" > /dev/null done } if [[ $# > 2 ]]; then _walk "$1" "$2" "$3" else chmod -Rc "$2" "$1" fi } |
I’m looking for a way to improve on this since it is quite costly for large directories: for each file or directory at least two programs are executed (file and chmod) which is not very efficient! For now, it gets the job done.
Enjoy! 