Hello, I recently uploaded 3000 photos to my server running apache 2.0 and linux redhat 8.0. Is there a way to change the permissions value all in one shot so it's readible for group and user (744)! I have done 800 by manualy and I Think this is a question worth asking!

chmod -R 744 dir

-R recursively changes permissions of directories and their contents. If you need the dir permissions to differ from its contents, you can just always do a chmod on the dir (without -R) after you do the chmod -R.

Or maybe a safer way would be to only change the files which match a certain criteria:

find /my_pics -type f -name \*.jpg | xargs chmod 744

mik can you explain what xargs does just little bit?
i never could understand what it does reading man page

This worked perfectly! You saved me about 10 hours of extra work! Thank you! If anybody new to this cant figur it out; Make sure you supply the full path to the directory!

I'm not mik, but maybe that'll do :}

Well, it takes whatever you feed it (usually from
stdin, usually something that will result in a number
of arguments >1 ;} ) and passes that as a parameter
to a command...

Lets say you want to display the contents of all
*.txt files in your ~ directory(and subs)....
Cheers,
Tink

Well the main feature I like about xargs is that it makes sure the command lines don't get to long, when you have a large list of arguments. Which makes it safe to use in scripts.

Ex.

Say you have a directory with thousands of files and you want to do an operation on each file.
chmod 777 *
Would give you the argument list too long error. An easy alternative is:
ls | xargs chmod 777
xargs will not append all the files as parameters but will call the chmod command several times each time with a new batch of files. This will result in something like:
chmod 777 file1 ...... filen1
chmod 777 filen1 ...... filen2
etc...

Uhmm well I don't know if that's any clearer then the man pages, but I hope it at least explains it a bit. You can always stick to Tinksters explanation if mine doens't make sense.