How to remove executable bit recursively from files (not directories)

Question

When I plug-in an USB stick (FAT) into my Mac or Ubuntu machine, all files have the executable bits set. After having copied the directory structure to my hard disk how do I remove the executable bits recursively just from the files and keep those on the directories?

Answer 1

If you cd into the correct path first:

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

The find finds all files of type 'f' (which means regular file) in the path . and then calls chmod -x on each file. The {} gets substituted for the file name and the \; terminates the chmod command.