Permission Automation

Okay, I am trying to write a script to help with changing permissions. What I would like it to do is look at a directory and all sub directories and change the permissions on files with a given extension. For instance if there have been 30 .doc files sent to the server all being in different directories I would like to be able to change their permissions in one fatal swoop.

Thanks.

One way of doing this is to use find:

$ find . -type f -name "*doc" -exec chmod 644 {} \;

Don't know if find is familiar to you, so here's a little breakdown of the command:

The . (dot) tells find were to start looking. A . (dot) starts looking from the dir you execute the command from. /home/user (a 'hard' path) is also legal.

-type f tells find to look for files and not directories, which would be -type d.
-name "*doc" here the name, or part of it can be given. This one looks for files that end with doc.

-exec chmod 644 {} \; find enables you to execute other unix command from within its structure. chmod 644 is excuted on every file found.

Please be carefull if you are not experienced with the -exec <command> {} \; structure.
One 'trick' to test if all is well: -exec echo "<command>" {} \;
Instead of executing the command it will be echoed.

For details: man find and google.

Hoipe this helps.

Yes, that does help. Thank you!

If anyone else has some input on other ways to go about doing this I would appreciate it also. You can never have too many ways to go about doing things.

Druuna's method is the by far most efficient and
effective ... :)


You could write a complicated script to
ls -R through the directories, parse the directory
structure out, grep for doc and ... nuh, stuff that ... :}



Cheers,
Tink