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Changing only directory permissions on UNIX recursively

One of those technical buggers that I couldn’t figure out, is how to make your command prompt run through a directory and change the permissions (chmod) for only directories in it. Then, just to top it off, do it recursively:

find /dir/to/chmod/all/dirs -type d -exec chmod -R 755 {} \;

That helps us, hope it helps others!  Many thanks to linox.be for the tip!

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 5th, 2006 at 7:56 am and is filed under quick tips. 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.

3 Responses to “Changing only directory permissions on UNIX recursively”

  1. ben Says:
    October 26th, 2006 at 7:35 pm

    It seems that this grabs ALL files as well. I got it to work by removing the -R option from chmod. I’m assuming this is because the find -type d command is grabbing all dirs (well, it spits out all the dirs when I run find /path -type d).

    Thanks. Neat trick.

    Ben

  2. Fred Says:
    December 5th, 2006 at 12:33 pm

    The “-R” isn’t mentioned on linox.be ;)

  3. ARVasko Says:
    February 21st, 2007 at 1:06 pm

    The option -R is useless… cause you already have all the directories when you use “find -type d”. =)

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