How to change permissions on folders, but not files?

Question

Is there a concise linux command (that will work on OSX) to change permissions on folders and all of their contents, but leave files in the current directory untouched? For example:

/parent/folder1 <-change permissions
/parent/folder2 <-change permissions
/parent/folder3 <-change permissions
/parent/folder3/file1 <-change permissions
/parent/folder3/file2 <-change permissions
/parent/file1 <-do not change permissions
/parent/file2 <-do not change permissions

score 8 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 19 '09 at 16:33

8

You would need to run 2 commands I believe. This is one way to do it:

# find . -mindepth 1 -type d | xargs chmod 700
# find . -mindepth 2 | xargs chmod 700

The first does directories at the current directory level and deeper. The second does all files and directories deeper than the current directory.

answered Oct 19 '09 at 16:33

djhowell

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Be careful with xargs, as it will most likely fail whenever the files/folders have spaces in their names. (it's possible to solve this passing some parameters to xargs... but is it really worth the trouble? It's easier to find -exec) – Denilson Sá Maia Apr 28 '10 at 13:17
What Denilson said. Especially on macs, many files have spaces in them. – Sirch Apr 21 '13 at 08:50

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 19 '09 at 19:33

4

This will change the permissions of every directory in the current directory and all files and folders within them, I think that's what you want but be careful because of the recursion...

find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec chmod -R 700 {} \;

answered Oct 19 '09 at 19:33

JamesHannah

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This wont change permissions on files in those directories. – Sirch Apr 21 '13 at 08:43

score 3 · Answer 3 · edited Oct 20 '09 at 20:15

3

You may use find for this or maybe, with a loop, for:

for directory in parent/*; do if [ -d $directory ]; then chmod -R 700 $directory; fi ;done

edited Oct 20 '09 at 20:15

Dennis Williamson

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answered Oct 19 '09 at 16:32

Ali Mezgani

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That only handles the directories. He wants to do files and directories if they are deeper than the PWD. – djhowell Oct 19 '09 at 16:36
Please note that chmod with -R flag, change permission in all directories and content recursively. – Ali Mezgani Oct 19 '09 at 16:42
Missed that, my mistake. – djhowell Oct 19 '09 at 16:46
`boucle, n 1: a fabric of uneven yarn that has an uneven knobby effect` - Huh? – Dennis Williamson Oct 19 '09 at 19:13
@Dennis Williamson: it seems that you don't like it :\ – Ali Mezgani Oct 19 '09 at 20:37
No, I just don't know how the word applies in this context or what its other meanings might be. Please enlighten me. Is it an idiom, slang, something else? – Dennis Williamson Oct 19 '09 at 21:54
Don't worry man, keep the good sentences :) and be sure that i did not understand the hole of your expression – Ali Mezgani Oct 19 '09 at 22:19
Hey, thanks for the explanation. It's very much appreciated. – Dennis Williamson Oct 20 '09 at 19:58
Found it: "boucle" == "loop" – Dennis Williamson Oct 20 '09 at 20:04
oups, i did not make attention to that, "boucle" mean a loop in french :\, i really was confused. – Ali Mezgani Oct 20 '09 at 20:44

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 19 '09 at 20:00

There is one trivial case where chmod can do this on its own. If you set mode +X (note, capital, not lowercase), it will only apply to directories. This is commonly used for cases where you want to make all files in a directory tree group or world readable. You would do something like this:

chmod a+rX somedir

This will add read and execute permission to somedir and all directories beneath it, but just read permission to regular files beneath it. There unfortunately is no corresponding mode for read/write permissions, though.

Nice. I didnt know about the X option. OP wanted to chmon on files in lower directories, this doesnt do that though. — Sirch, Apr 21 '13 at 08:52

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Apr 21 '13 at 08:23

find  . -type d -mindepth 1 -print -exec chmod 755 {}/* \;

Find every subdirectory of the current directory (-type d and -mindepth 1), and run chmod for all files in each directory found.

{} refers to the directory find is evaluating, and /* tells chmod to operate on just the files in that directory.

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Sep 30 '15 at 05:26

Here's the one-liner for the general case:

find /parent -maxdepth 1 -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod -R 700

The -print0 and -0 arguments use NUL instead of newline as a record separator, so this is safe for filenames with spaces, newlines, and so on. And unlike -exec, it batches filenames into fewer invocations of chmod.

Bonus:

In cases where you know you don't have hidden directories at the top level of /parent (like /parent/.foo) it's even easier:

chmod -R 700 /parent/*/

How to change permissions on folders, but not files?

6 Answers6