How do I specify folders only for chmod

Question

I have a 30GB website, with loads of folders, and files. I want all the folders to have the permission 745 and all the files to have 644. I tried using chmod -R 745 public_html/ but all the sub files get that permission. How can I change all the folders (only) to this permission with chmod?

Answer 1

Unless you delibaretely not want the group members to access the directory (will be a unusual case), you should use 755 for directories.

You can use find.

For files :

find /path/to/public_html/ -type f -exec chmod 0644 {} +

For directories (using 755) :

find /path/to/public_html/ -type d -exec chmod 0755 {} +

• -type f will only find the files and execute chmod 0644 accordingly

• -type d will find the directories only and execute chmod 0755 on them.