Bash – How to set permissions recursively on a dir (with ACL enabled)

aclbashlinuxpermissions

For example, I want to give my colleagues write access to certain directory. Let's assume that subdirectories in it had access rights 775, files 664, and also there were some executable files in the dir – 775.

Now I want to add write permissions. With chmod, I could try something like

chmod o+w -R mydir/

But that's not cool, since I don't want to make the dir world-writable – I want give access only to certain users, so I want to use ACL. But is there an easy way to set those permissions? As I see it, I need to tackle at least three cases (dirs, files, executable files) separately:

find -type d -exec setfacl -m u:colleague:rwx {} \;
find -type f -executable -exec setfacl -m u:colleague:rwx {} \;
find -type f \! -executable -exec setfacl -m u:colleague:rw {} \;

It seems quite a lot of code lines for such a simple task. Is there a better way?

Best Answer

setfacl has a recursive option (-R) just like chmod:

  -R, --recursive
      Apply operations to all files and directories recursively. This
      option cannot be mixed with `--restore'.

it also allows for the use of the capital-x X permission, which means:

  execute only if the file is a directory or already has
  execute permission for some user (X)

so doing the following should work:

setfacl -R -m u:colleague:rwX .

(all quotes are from man setfacl for acl-2.2.52 as shipped with Debian)

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