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How do I recursively execute chmod or chown for hidden files?

sudo chmod -R 775 * does not work on hidden files.

The same thing goes for sudo chown -R user:group.

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Oct 12 '11 at 13:12

3 Answers

up vote 7 down vote accepted

If you're okay also chmod'ing the current directory, do that and let -R do the heavy lifting. -R does not ignore hidden files.

sudo chmod -R 775 .
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This (* .*) is not the safest way to do it. Particularly, it would recurse into parent directory, which means it chmods also siblings of the current directory. The proper way would be * ..?* .[^.]* or, even better (considering the wildcards might not match any files) $(ls -A). – jpalecek Oct 12 '11 at 13:34
1  
@jpalecek: The output of ls is unparseable; trying to parse it is asking for trouble. The proper approach is to use shell globbing. – Scott Severance Dec 11 '11 at 17:58
@JulianKnight I've stricken out the bad answer. Sorry all for the bad advice. I never saw jpalacek's comment, and I can't delete this answer since it's been accepted. – John Kugelman Mar 21 at 21:46
Well done @JohnKugelman. – Julian Knight Mar 21 at 21:48
up vote 11 down vote

* doesn't include hidden files by default, but if you're in bash, you can do this with:

shopt -s dotglob

Read more about it in bash's builtin manual:

If set, Bash includes filenames beginning with a `.' in the results of filename expansion.

This will make * include hidden files too.

chmod -R 775 *

Disable it with:

shopt -u dotglob
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up vote 0 down vote

Another option is to use find i like it since you can have very fine grained control over it.

find <path to start from> -exec chown <options> {} \+

find -path '<path to include>' -exec chown <options> {} \+

The only downside is that find has different syntax on different versions.

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