[Gllug] Recursively setting file permissions

[Tethys]

Dylan writes:

>will set all files as executable which is not on since none of them are! 
>So what do I need to do to get the correct permissions? In other words 
>- how can I get chmod to discriminate between files and directories?

You can't. However, you can call chmod selectively, using find to
discriminate between the two:

	find /top/level/directory -type d -exec chmod 770 {} \;
	find /top/level/directory -type f -exec chmod 660 {} \;

>Also, is it possible to have new files and directories to automatically 
>have the correct permissions? (I know about umask, but want to retain 
>the default for home directories, just have the rwxrwx--- for this 
>shared data area.

No, not as far as I'm aware. I guess it may be theoretically possible
to have a per-directory umask using filesystem attributes under Linux,
but AFAIK no one has implemented it yet, and it would be inherrently
non-portable. But even then, umask can only remove permissions, not
add them. The only way to explicitly set permissions on a file at
creation time is with the mode argument to open(2). You could, I
suppose, write a shim library to intercept calls to open(2) and
give them the desired mode depending on the directory (albeit with
a performance hit).

Tet
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