Ever come across the problem of needing to chmod a directory and its many, many, sub-directories, but you don’t want to touch any of the files? Maybe it’s the exact opposite, or you need to recursively change the permissions on only files with a specific extension. Well I had a similar problem with my web server settings.

find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

• This will “find” all directories, starting at “.“, and chmod them to 755.

find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

• This snippet does the opposite and finds only files. The difference (beside the file permissions) is the “-type f“, “f” specifies files and “d” directories.

If you check the comments, you’ll find a few additional snippets:

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

• This lets you “find” files (“-type f“) with a specific extension (“-name '*.htm*'“) and chmod them with your desired permission (“-exec chmod 644 {}“).

chmod -R o+rX

• This snippet will recursively chmod “other” (“o“) permissions with read/eXecutable (“+rX“), and the capital X ensures that directories and files set (user/group permissions) to executable will be properly modified, while ignoring regular (non-executable) files.