Update Directory and File Permissions Separately

Multiple times I’ve needed to apply a different set of permissions on files verses folders; commonly when configuring web applications. Below is a quick walk-through on how to achieve this goal.

Directories

For directories, run find ensuring -type is set to d. This tells find to locate all directories recursively and execute a permission change of 755 only to directories.

find [path] -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

Files

For files, its a similar process with -type is set to f, for files. In this case, we don’t typically want to execute permissions on files unless they’re a script or executable so we’ll configure the permissions to be 644.

find [path] -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

Thats all there is to it. If you run ls -l on the top-level directory, you’ll see all directories now have the permission of 755, with files set to 644.