Thanx to both of you for your suggestions. I was and am going to be using whatever we discover here as a learning tool to be applied across other directories where permissions need to be changed.

I am wanting to find files that are more permissive than in this case 644 and change them to 644. That would be accomplised by either of your examples I think.

I may need to run my scripts more than once and need only make changes if the files are more permissive than stated, plus I also need to capture the changes in a log for documentation.

I guess I need an ls -l of the directory to get the perms and based on the perms then perform a chmod and >> to a logfile.

Does that make any sense?

Thanks,
JB aka Altamaha