I have a large heirarchical directory and file structure, many levels deep with lots of subdirectories at every level. There are many more files than directories. I wanted all the files to have permissions 640 and all the directories 750.

I issued a command like this where "startdir" was my highest level starting point for my changes. Then I had to spend 30 minutes traversing the rather large directory tree to change the permissions on all the subdirectories to 750. It was tedious. Is there another way I could have rapidly changed all the files to 640 and all the subdirectories to 750 without having to modify the subdirectories one by painful one?

Hi,

chmod in combination with find can do that:

For files (-type f is the key):
find . -type f -exec chmod 640 {} \;

For directories (-type d)
find . -type d -exec chmod 750 {} \;

Man find for details.

Hope this helps.

Hey, thank you very much, druuna. That looks like the sort of thing I was hoping for, a way to differentiate a file from a directory.