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I want to change permissions on a tree on Centos 4 to add execute permissions for all directories recursively from a directory. If I use normal chmod, files other than directories are also modified:

chmod -R o+x /my/path/here

How can I only affect directories?

Oliver Salzburg
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WilliamKF
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3 Answers3

61

Run find on -type d (directories) with the -exec primary to perform the chmod only on folders:

find /your/path/here -type d -exec chmod o+x {} \;

To be sure it only performs it on desired objects, you can run just find /your/path/here -type d first; it will simply print out the directories it finds.

Daniel Beck
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25

See Command line examples - chmod in the Wikipedia.

# Remove the execute permission on all files in a directory 
# tree, while allowing for directory browsing.
chmod -R a-x+X directory

As added by Daniel: this should work in your case:

chmod -R o+X directory
Gabriel Staples
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  • This would affect the current permissions of files within directories. – scriptmonster Jul 29 '12 at 15:27
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    @scriptmonster the line quoted is wrong for this case, but `chmod -R o+X directory` should work for the OP. – Daniel Beck Jul 29 '12 at 15:36
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    For those wondering about the difference, like me, it is that X will *also* apply execute permissions to any file which already has at least one execute permission bit already set (either user, group or other). In the general case the accepted answer is better. – ixe013 Nov 27 '14 at 18:23
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find /home/mydir -type d | xargs chmod ugo+rx

This works on CentOS6, which the above find -exec does not. Basically it just pipes the list of directories to the xargs command which sends them to chmod. The chmod then sets universal read and execute (search) on the directories. To do this for all users in home use sudo:

sudo sh -c "find /home/ -type d | xargs chmod ugo+rx"
Mark White
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