bash loop to change permissions

Question

I'm trying to change all the permissions for the files in my ~/Documents folder and I thought the following little loop would work, but it doesn't seem to be working. Can anyone help me? Here's the loop:

files=~/Documents/*
for $file in $files {
   chmod 755 $file }

I'm trying to write this directly into the bash command line gives me the following error:

-bash: syntax error near unexpected token `chmod'

thanks for your help/advice

Answer 1

There are risks in making your documents executable. I recommend against it unless you know exactly what you're doing.

I'm going to take a wild guess that you don't really want to make all your Documents folder executable, and what you're really trying to do is standardize on user-writable everyone-else-readable permission for everything in that folder.

Note that (as someone mentioned in another answer) the chmod command has its own "recursive" option, -R. Note also that you can use "symbolic" permissions with chmod, you're not stuck with octal-only. So:

chmod -R go+r-wx ~/Documents/

will add Read and remove Write and eXecute functions from everything in and under ~/Documents/.

Note that this will make subdirectories readable, but will not provide access to the files within them (because that's what the executable bit on a directory does). So you may want to use TWO commands:

find ~/Documents/ -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find ~/Documents/ -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

The first line only runs chmod on directories, making them both readable and accessible. The second line affects only your files, making them readable by the world.