How to chmod all directories except files (recursively)?

Question

How to chmod 755 all directories but no file (recursively) ?

Inversely, how to chmod only files (recursively) but no directory ?

Answer 1

To recursively give directories read&execute privileges:

find /path/to/base/dir -type d -exec chmod 755 {} +

To recursively give files read privileges:

find /path/to/base/dir -type f -exec chmod 644 {} +

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Or, if there are many objects to process:

chmod 755 $(find /path/to/base/dir -type d)
chmod 644 $(find /path/to/base/dir -type f)

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Or, to reduce chmod spawning:

find /path/to/base/dir -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 755 
find /path/to/base/dir -type f -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 644

Answer 2

A common reason for this sort of thing is to set directories to 755 but files to 644. In this case there's a slightly quicker way than nik's find example:

chmod -R u+rwX,go+rX,go-w /path

Meaning:

• -R = recursively;
• u+rwX = Users can read, write and execute;
• go+rX = group and others can read and execute;
• go-w = group and others can't write

The important thing to note here is that uppercase X acts differently to lowercase x. In manual we can read:

The execute/search bits if the file is a directory or any of the execute/search bits are set in the original (unmodified) mode.

In other words, chmod u+X on a file won't set the execute bit; and g+X will only set it if it's already set for the user.

Answer 3

If you want to make sure the files are set to 644 and there are files in the path which have the execute flag, you will have to remove the execute flag first. +X doesn't remove the execute flag from files who already have it.

Example:

chmod -R ugo-x,u+rwX,go+rX,go-w path

Update: this appears to fail because the first change (ugo-x) makes the directory unexecutable, so all the files underneath it are not changed.

Answer 4

I decided to write a little script for this myself.

Recursive chmod script for dirs and/or files — Gist

It basically does the recursive chmod but also provides a bit of flexibility for command line options (sets directory and/or file permissions, or exclude both it automatically resets everything to 755-644). It also checks for a few error scenarios.

I also wrote about it on my blog.

Answer 5

Try this python script; it requires no spawning of processes and does only two syscalls per file. Apart from an implementation in C, it will probably be the fastest way of doing it (I needed it to fix a filesystem of 15 million files which were all set to 777)

#!/usr/bin/python3
import os
for par, dirs, files in os.walk('.'):
    for d in dirs:
        os.chmod(par + '/' + d, 0o755)
    for f in files:
        os.chmod(par + '/' + f, 0o644)

In my case, a try/catch was required around the last chmod, since chmodding some special files failed.

Answer 6

To recursively give directories "read" and "execute" privileges:

find /directory-path  -type d -exec sudo chmod 2775 {} +

Answer 7

You could use the following bash script as an example. Be sure to give it executable permissions (755). Simply use ./autochmod.sh for the current directory, or ./autochmod.sh <dir> to specify a different one.

#!/bin/bash

if [ -e $1 ]; then
    if [ -d $1 ];then
        dir=$1
    else
        echo "No such directory: $1"
        exit
    fi
else
    dir="./"
fi

for f in $(ls -l $dir | awk '{print $8}'); do
    if [ -d $f ];then
        chmod 755 $f
    else
        chmod 644 $f
    fi
done