How can I recursively chmod everything inside of a folder?
e.g. I have a folder called var
which contains many subfolders and files.
How can I apply chmod 755 recursively to this folder and all its contents?
chmod
How can I recursively chmod everything inside of a folder?
e.g. I have a folder called var
which contains many subfolders and files.
How can I apply chmod 755 recursively to this folder and all its contents?
Best Answer
Please refer to the manual (
man chmod
):chmod -R 755 /path/to/directory
would perform what you want.However…
You don't usually want to 755 all files; these should be 644, as they often do not need to be executable. Hence, you could do
find /path/to/directory -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
to only change directory permissions. Use-type f
andchmod 644
to apply the permissions to files.This will overwrite any existing permissions. It's not a good idea to do it for
/var
— that folder has the correct permissions set up by the system already. For example, some directories in/var
require 775 permissions (e.g.,/var/log
).So, before doing
sudo chmod
— particularly on system folders — pause and think about whether that is really required.