recursive yet selective chmod

I would like to do something like:

chmod -R 664 pics

However, the above command also alters the flags for directories; I want to avoid changing the attributes of the directories.

(The reason I'm doing this is that Rox-Filer generates thumbnails only for image files that do not have executable bits set; therefore I wish to chmod my pics folder tree, and remove the executable bits from all image files. If I remove the executable bits from folders, however, I can no longer open them.)

Try 'chmod /*/*.jpg' and add an asterisk and slash for each level.

oops, 'chmod 664 /*/*.jpg'

Or
find -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \;
should do it.

-- (From the top of the directories you want to recursively change - not from / or anything. )

Thanks for the responses. Digiot - what's the \; at the end for?

I don't really know - find just requires it for its syntax. It marks the end of arguments to whatever is exec'ed. As guesses, possibly since you're issuing two commands, in a sense, you need both the semi-colon as a 'line separator' and a newline. The first tells find you're done with chmod and the second tells bash you're done with find. Or, going another way, the semi-colon lets find tell chmod its done when find execs it. The '{}' is substituted with filenames by find and the ';' actually tells chmod it can execute. Maybe the command is actually 'chmod file1 ; chmod file2 ; chmod file 3...' with the semi-colon being inserted on each file that returns 0 from the type test when 'chmod file1 chmod file2' would be an error. (The backslash is just escaping the semi-colon, of course.) Last shot is that it's just some kind of getopt() requirement. It'd take seeing (and understanding) the source code to really say, I guess. Somebody who can do that should be able to say for sure.

Oooo!!! this find stuff is exciting! My life has been horrible since I had all my music on an NTFS partition before I bailed on Windows, and everthing was executable, and I did a chmod -r to unexecutable them, and fuckit if I could see inside directories anymore.

Thank heavens!

A penguin For posterity