UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,
I need a command or a script to change the group permissions to be the same as the owner permissions for all my files and directories (recursive)
any idea ?

Ok, I found a sollution

Code:

#!/bin/ksh
echo "Enter Base Directory: "
read source_dir
for file in `find $source_dir`
do
#full=`ls -ld $file |awk '{print $1}'`
owner=`ls -ld $file | cut -c2-4`
#echo "$full $file ----------------> chmod g+$owner $file"
chmod g+$owner $file
done

Thanks anyway

A substantially better solution, which correctly handles filenames with spaces in them:

Code:

find $1 -exec /bin/sh -c 'chmod g+`ls -ld "{}" | cut -c2-4` "{}"' \;

Either put it in a shell script, or run as-is, replacing $1 with whatever you want to process.

This does not work for all permissions. For example, for files with permissions like 500 (r-x------) your code will try to set permissions like this:

Code:

chmod g+r-x "foo"

Also, you want to use "g=" not "g+". Using "g+" will add permissions, so if group already has a permission the user does not then you won't end up with an exact copy. You will end up with group having more permissions than user. Granted it is probably unlikely that group would have a permission that user does not have. But the following would be more correct and not take any chances. I think this is closer to what you want:

Code:

find $1 -exec /bin/sh -c 'chmod g=`ls -ld "{}" | cut -c2-4 | tr -d "-"` "{}"'

Now the only other problem is that this is terribly slow because it starts up a shell for each and every file and directory in the tree. Not sure how to fix that since you to have find invoke a shell to interpret the pipeline.

If you have Perl 5.x installed, this works:

find . | perl -ne 'chomp; $a = (stat $_)[2] & 07777; $a = ($a & 07707) | (($a >> 3) & 070); chmod($a, $_)'

Just change the "." parameter of find to whatever your base directory is. This creates only two processes and correctly handles any combination of permissions you can come up with.