I want to recursively chmod all of the subdirectories below my calcium directory:
chmod a+wx calcium
How do I change the above command to do this?
I believe I'm using bash shell although I'm not sure how to verify this.
Cool! Thanks .
Yen
2009-05-02 18:34:56
As xkcd150 mentioned in a later answer, this will chmod *everything*. Not just subdirectories as the question specifies.
Danny
2009-05-02 19:08:17
Sure, it is. But it isn't terribly useful to only have write/execute on the directory but not the contents. Which is why I use this form.
dirkgently
2009-05-02 19:17:06
+1
A:
$ echo $SHELL
should tell you what shell you are using. But that likely doesn't matter, since chmod is an executable that any shell would call just the same.
Jeremy Huiskamp
2009-05-02 18:35:22
+12
A:
chmod -R is going to do it on everything, not just directories.
To target only directories you can use find + xargs
find calcium/ -type d | xargs chmod a+wx
xkcd150
2009-05-02 18:40:23
find has a -exec. Use it. It's not bugged like xargs is. (xargs is bugged for filenames containing spaces and quote characters unless you use the -0 option and use find's -print0 to feed it NULL-separated data). Use this instead: find foo/ -type d -exec chmod a+wx {} \;
lhunath
2009-05-02 20:23:14
`find .... -print0 | xargs -0 ....`. find's -exec is nice, but it can lead to a horrible amount of fork/execs. (I've used computers and workloads where xargs turned an unusably-slow system into a tolerable system.)
sarnold
2010-07-19 10:09:23