Changing Permissions Recursively

[egan]

I would like to make a bash script that changes permissions recursively, so as to ease the transition between umasks.
Basically, by default the umask is 022, but I prefer it 077 for my own home directory. I can change it easily enough, but all the files created before I changed it retain a umask of 022.

I would like to be able to change all the files to a permission of 600, and all directories to a permission of 700.

How would I do this?

[lomcevak]

Use the 'find' command:

find /path/to/home -type f -exec chmod 600 {} \;
find /path/to/home -type d -exec chmod 700 {} \;

[egan]

Ah, nice! I didn't think of that.

[egan]

Just wondering, what does the:
{} \;
do?

[lomcevak]

The format of find's -exec option is:

-exec command ;

Whenever the string {} is seen within command it is replaced by the current file name being processed.

The semi-colon ( ; ) has to be escaped with the backslash (\) to keep the shell from treating it as the end of the find command.

Look at the find manpage (# man find) for details.

[egan]

Ah, that is what I figured, but I just wanted to make sure.