Quick tip – set permissions recursively for files or directory

Somebody whacks your file permissions by issuing sudo chmod 0777 -R * and all your directories and files are colored green (if you know what I mean). That is a bad thing for file permissions especially for files for your web application. You can set the correct permission with a few commands.

Setting directory permissions recursively

Under normal situations, directory permissions should be 0755 which means only the owner has read-write-execute permissions and the rest only have read-execute.

find . -type d -exec chmod 0755 {} \;

Setting file permissions recursively

For files, normally it is 0644 where owner has read-write and the rest has read-only permissions. No execute permission is needed for files that are not executables.

find . -type f -exec chmod 0644 {} \;

You can set more restrictive permissions as you wish by simply changing the permission code.

Enjoy and share.