Quick Tip – Changing permissions on ALL folders, or ALL files

If you have list of folders and files that you need to apply some blanket changes to, but you need different permissions on files then you do folders, here’s the commands

# this will change all folders to 755

find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

# this will change all files to 644

find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

Be careful running these commands however, as you need to make sure you are in the right directory.  For example, on a cpanel server “/home/username/public_html”.  This will change all permissions on files or folders from public_html onward in their folders.  If you were to do this in the root folder “/” then it would alter permissions on ALL files and folders on the entire server.

These are typical file permissions on sites like wordpress or drupal.