changing chmod for files but not directories
UnixGrepChmodUnix Problem Overview
I need to use chmod to change all files recursivly to 664. I would like to skip the folders. I was thinking of doing something like this
ls -lR | grep ^-r | chmod 664
This doesn't work, I'm assuming because I can't pipe into chmod Anyone know of an easy way to do this?
Thanks
Unix Solutions
Solution 1 - Unix
A find -exec
answer is a good one but it suffers from the usually irrelevant shortcoming that it creates a separate sub-process for every single file. However it's perfectly functional and will only perform badly when the number of files gets really large. Using xargs
will batch up the file names into large groups before running a sub-process for that group of files.
You just have to be careful that, in using xargs
, you properly handle filenames with embedded spaces, newlines or other special characters in them.
A solution that solves both these problems is (assuming you have a decent enough find
and xargs
implementation):
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 644
The -print0
causes find
to terminate the file names on its output stream with a NUL character (rather than a space) and the -0
to xargs
lets it know that it should expect that as the input format.
Solution 2 - Unix
Another way to do this is to use find ... -exec ...
as follows:
find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
The problem is that the -exec
starts a chmod
process for every file which is inefficient. A solution that avoids this is:
find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} +
This assembles as many file names arguments as possible on the chmod
processes command line. The find ... | xargs ...
approach is similar; see the accepted answer.
For the record, using back-ticks is going to break if there are too many files to be chmoded, or the aggregated length of the pathnames is too large.
Solution 3 - Unix
My succinct two cents...
Linux:
$ chmod 644 `find -type f`
OSX:
$ chmod 644 `find . -type f`
This works to recursively change all files contained in the current directory and all of its sub-directories. If you want to target a different directory, substitute .
with the correct path:
$ chmod 644 `find /home/my/special/folder -type f`
Solution 4 - Unix
>"find . -type f -print | xargs chmod 444 "shoud work, isn't it ? >If not, find . -print >myfile.sh >and vi myfile.sh removing the directories (they should not be soo many), and then >1,$s/^/chmod 444/ >and sh myfile.sh.
Solution 5 - Unix
with GNU find
find /path -type f -exec chmod 644 {} +;