Linux – Default permissions on Linux home directories

You can do the entire task using just find:

$ find . -type f ! \( -perm 755 -o -perm 644 \) -printf "%m\t%p\n"

Example

Make all permutations of permissions (000-777).

$ touch {0..7}{0..7}{0..7}
$ for i in {0..7}{0..7}{0..7}; do chmod $i $i;done
$ find . -type f | wc -l
512

A sample of our find command's list of files it's finding:

$ find . -type f ! \( -perm 755 -o -perm 644 \) -printf "%m\t%p\n"| head -10
734 ./734
376 ./376
555 ./555
663 ./663
256 ./256
336 ./336
2   ./002
152 ./152
527 ./527
416 ./416

If we run our find command we can confirm that it worked:

$ find . -type f ! \( -perm 755 -o -perm 644 \) -printf "%m\t%p\n" | grep 755
$ find . -type f ! \( -perm 755 -o -perm 644 \) -printf "%m\t%p\n" | grep 644

Try to run umask in your folder. If it returns anything other than '0022' then this is your problem. In your case it should initialy output '0177'. The permission system when creating directory is basically computed: default - umask 0777 is the default mode for directories, and 0666 to ordinary files, but there are different umasks, if I understand these things right. Try to execute umask a=rx,uu+w.

EDIT: You can use umask to give execute bit to directory to be able to cd into it, but not to files. These have to be given execute bit manually because of security. Simply add chmod +x <file> to your script. And, execute flag set on file anything other than executable has no effect.