19 Responses to 'Recursively chmod directories only'

1. 1 Tim Says:
   November 10th, 2006 at 10:28 am

   Thanks!!! It’s amazing how the simplest things can drive you insane.

2. 2 Ernesto Says:
   December 21st, 2006 at 11:35 pm

   This was extremely helpful for me too, so thanks for the tip. Exactly what I was looking for.

   Now, if you could explain the syntax a little bit in order for us to be able to invent similar constructs? I am trying to understand exactly everything after the 644, that is

   {} \;.

   What does this stand for?

3. 3 Joel Says:
   January 19th, 2007 at 6:29 am

   Ernesto:

   It’s all in man find. The {} gets replaced by the current file find is processing (which is why you don’t need to use chmod -R), and \; is just there to mark the end of the exec expression.

4. 4 shilpa Says:
   January 19th, 2007 at 7:22 pm

   This is simply wonderful. Look at my stupidity —
   >chmod -Rf ./*.java ./**/*.java ./**/**/*.java ./**/**/**/*.java ……………………

5. 5 crystalsinger Says:
   February 19th, 2007 at 10:56 am

   Great post - have clipped it for future reference!

   I also discovered that you can do (e.g.)

   find . -type f -name '*.htm*' -exec chmod 644 {} \;

   to only apply chmod to files with names matching a specified pattern. Great when you need to clean up after a php application install and set php files to 755, html files to 644, etc….

6. 6 huuan Says:
   April 15th, 2007 at 9:54 am

   thanks very cool, you rule!
   to restrict to an owner you can also do:
   find . -type d -user fileowner -exec chmod 0755 {} \;

7. 7 Wes Says:
   July 13th, 2007 at 7:13 pm

   This just saved me one huge headache, shows what can be done if you think out of the box..

8. 8 Ron Says:
   August 20th, 2007 at 2:17 pm

   Wow, thanks all.. *nix is so f-king awesome.

   Powerful.. Try doing a rename/repermission like this in windows…. (or dos)

   Ron

9. 9 Rocket Monkey Rodeo » Blog Archive » Recursively chmod Says:
   September 23rd, 2007 at 12:17 pm

   [...] /dev/movabletripe » Recursively chmod directories only [...]

10. 10 Data Access Notes » Recursively chmod directories only Says:
    November 4th, 2007 at 2:23 am

    [...] source: http://movabletripe.com/archive/recursively-chmod-directories-only/ At this source, there is discussion and additional find commands from responders. [...]

11. 11 Eugen Pyvovarov Says:
    November 16th, 2007 at 8:38 pm

    Рекурсивна зміна параметрів доступів тільки для файлів чи директорій…

    Утилітки chmod та chown не вміють змінювати параметри доступу тільки для файлів, або тільки для директорій. Знайшов цікавий приклад, як таке мо…

12. 12 Michal Iglewski Says:
    December 30th, 2007 at 2:04 am

    Thanks!!!

    It will also work for .files

13. 13 thehenrys.net » Recursively chmod directories or files only Says:
    February 21st, 2008 at 2:54 am

    [...] http://movabletripe.com/archive/recursively-chmod-directories-only/ [...]

14. 14 Yep! Says:
    March 11th, 2008 at 6:46 am

    Perfect, it solved my problem instantly!

15. 15 Allen Halsey Says:
    March 21st, 2008 at 6:28 am

    Thanks for the tip! Reading the man page for chmod, I came across another tip for recursive chmod. I often encounter the situation where the ‘user-owner’ permissions are correct, but the ‘other’ permissions have been made too restrictive, disallowing read access. The following command will fix it:

    chmod -R o+rX .

    Note that the capital ‘X’ causes it to do the right thing regarding the executable bit: directories will be executable and files will be made executable only if the file is executable for the ‘user-owner’ or ‘group-owner’. Check out the man page for chmod.

    BTW, I always like to say ‘user-owner’, ‘group-owner’, and ‘other’, to help me keep straight that ‘u’ is for ‘user-owner’ and ‘o’ is for ‘other’.

16. 16 Justin Says:
    March 28th, 2008 at 6:29 am

    Another helpful command for changing files of only a specific type/extension is:

    find ./ -name *.pdf -exec chmod 755 {} \;

17. 17 Daniel Says:
    April 6th, 2008 at 8:27 am

    Awesome! Thanks for the tip, exactly what I was looking for.

18. 18 Charles Says:
    April 8th, 2008 at 4:56 am

    Take not to do something silly when mass changing files. I untarred a tarball, and blithely (blindly!) changed files to 644. Of course I needed many configure files to be executable. They weren’t. the build broke. Silly me!

    Otherwise, this is what I needed.

19. 19 Garçon aka Martin Kopta » Blog Archive » links for 2008-06-07 Says:
    June 8th, 2008 at 9:33 am

    [...] /dev/movabletripe » Recursively chmod directories only Recursively chmod directories only June 19th, 2006 find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} ; This will recursively search your directory tree (starting at dir ‘dot’) and chmod 755 all directories only. Similarly, the following will chmod all files only (tags: commandline chmod) [...]

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