Find all writable files in the current directory

Question

I want to quickly identify all writable files in the directory. What is the quick way to do it?

Answer 1

find -type f -maxdepth 1 -writable 

Answer 2

The -writable option will find files that are writable by the current user. If you'd like to find files that are writable by anyone (or even other combinations), you can use the -perm option:

find -maxdepth 1 -type f -perm /222 

This will find files that are writable by their owner (whoever that may be):

find -maxdepth 1 -type f -perm /200 

Various characters can be used to control the meaning of the mode argument:

• / - any permission bit
• - - all bits (-222 would mean all - user, group and other)
• no prefix - exact specification (222 would mean no permssions other than write)

Answer 3

to find writable files regardless of owner, group or others, you can check the w flag in the file permission column of ls.

ls -l | awk '$1 ~ /^.*w.*/'

$1 is the first field, (ie the permission block of ls -l) , the regular expression just say find the letter "w" in field one. that's all.

if you want to find owner write permission

ls -l | awk '$1 ~ /^..w/'

if you want to find group write permission

ls -l | awk '$1 ~ /^.....w/'

if you want to find others write permission

ls -l | awk '$1 ~ /w.$/'

Answer 4

-f will test for a file

-w will test whether it's writeable

Example:

$ for f in *; do [ -f $f ] && [ -w $f ] && echo $f; done