Shell Permissions – How to Change Permissions of Multiple Files Found with Find Command

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

In addition to the answers given in the comments, you should also note that your script will break on any filenames with spaces in them.

You can do all of this in a single command using find, rather than trying to parse a list of filenames output from find. Much more robust; handles filenames regardless of special characters or whitespace.

find "$1" -type f -exec chown "$2" {} \; -exec chmod 600 {} \;

Note that if the chown fails on a given file, the chmod will not be run on that file. That's probably the behavior you want anyway.

Since you already ran an erroneous command that removed execute permissions from your "Documents" directory, you need to add back execute permissions:

chmod u+x Documents

If there are more directories that erroneously had execute permissions removed, you should be able to fix them with:

find Documents -type d -exec chmod u+x {} \;

I don't think you'll need this, though, as once execute permissions were removed from "Documents" then none of its subdirectories would be accessible, so execute permissions wouldn't have been removed from them.