Using chmod to recursively change directories / files

[GOD]Anck · 02-22-2005, 03:55 AM

Forgive my questions, this is probably something simple but man chmod did not help me out.

I've got a directory with many subdirectories and files in it. I would like to recursively change the permissions on all the subdirectories to 755, but leave the permissions on files as 644. Issuing chmod 755 * will change the permissions on files as well as directories. Is there a way to tell chmod to change only directories, or only files, recursively?

Thanks!

heema · 02-22-2005, 04:12 AM

you could make a script to do that

linuxxed · 02-22-2005, 06:49 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by [GOD]Anck
Forgive my questions, this is probably something simple but man chmod did not help me out. I've got a directory with many subdirectories and files in it. I would like to recursively change the permissions on all the subdirectories to 755, but leave the permissions on files as 644. Issuing chmod 755 * will change the permissions on files as well as directories. Is there a way to tell chmod to change only directories, or only files, recursively?

Thanks!

find [YOURDIR] -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

find [YOURDIR] -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

zovres · 02-24-2005, 11:59 AM

AWE freaking SOME

just what I have been looking for

thx

bucovaina78 · 11-10-2008, 10:38 AM

indeed nice one :-)

bucovaina78 · 11-10-2008, 12:50 PM

I used this command for my directory structure to change the permissions and it worked fine (as I mentioned before). But still I have a few questions about it. Sounds stupid but I don't fully understand every single piece of the command I'm typing.

Code:

find [YOURDIR] -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

If I understand it well, you tell to search for directories, and when a match is found it changes the permissions to 755.

But, for example, I want to look up all the files in a directory with mp3-files that contain "John Denver"

I tried

Code:

find /.../music -type f -exec grep -i john denver

That resulted in ... errr nothing

so I tried

Code:

find /.../music -type f | grep -i john denver

and that one worked!!

So my question is, what is the -exec thing? It tells to run chmod, but what's the difference with the | (pipe)? I'm propably wrong but for me it does exactly the same, the output generated from find is "piped" to grep. Grep itself is only going to show the matches "john denver" (case insensitive -i )

And question nr 2 is why "{} \;" at the end?

as an exercise for myself I tried to list all the mp3-files that had an ID3tag: 1990 in the "year-field"

So I tried:

Code:

user@ubuntu:/.../music$ find -type f -exec id3ed -y 1990 {} \;

File ./e/Emir Kusturica & The No Smoking Orchestra/Life is a Miracle/02-Evergreen.mp3: (tag v1.1)
songname[max:30]: Evergreen

I learned at school a long time ago: "An experiment never fails, it's possible that you don't get the expected result, but again, it never fails"

So the question now is: what am I doing wrong if I want to list all the files in my music directory with an ID3-tag: 1990 in the "year-field"

salter · 11-10-2008, 06:16 PM

The manual for find ($ man find) has an explanation for -exec (listed under ACTIONS).
-exec launches an application (chmod in this case)
'{}' is replaced with the current filename
'\' is used for proper escaping of the input sequence

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