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Jun 30 2008

Changing permissions only on files or only on directories

Posted by Florian N in Unix general, tags:

The following two commands will change the permissions only on the files in a directory even if there are also other directories, and the same for directories only:

This only chmod’s files to 644:
[root@box1 ~]# find -type f | xargs -i chmod 644 {}

This only chmod’s directories to 755:
[root@box1 ~]# find -name '*' -type d | xargs -i chmod 755 {}

Also, as an addition here the most common permissions on server are 644 for files and 755 for directories, you may want to make sure that the files/directories are not having 777 permissions as this is a big security risk. Most of the time some scripts will need 777 permissions and if this is the case would be a good idea to find a way around this or just find another script that does not need 777 permissions set.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 9:20 am and is filed under Unix general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Changing permissions only on files or only on directories”
  1. x------xNo Gravatar says:
    November 29, 2008 at 7:31 am

    There are problems with the solutions above if any file’s or folder’s name contains special characters like quotes.
    In that case, use this (thanks to the xargs man page):

    find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0i chmod 644 {}
    find . -type d -print0 | xargs -0i chmod 755 {}

    Be careful, the 0′s are zeros.

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