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In Ubuntu I want to change the file permissions of a whole folder and all its sub folders to read/write by anybody

I have tried sudo chmod 666 /var/www and sudo chmod 755 /var/www without success

update

I have since found that changing privileges can also be done in the GUI by opening nautilus as sudo.

megaman
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3 Answers3

99

So that you don't mess up other permissions already on the file, use the flag +, such as via

sudo chmod -R o+rw /var/www

19

If you just want to change file permissions, you want to be careful about using -R on chmod since it will change anything, files or folders. If you are doing a relative change (like adding write permission for everyone), you can do this:

sudo chmod -R a+w /var/www

But if you want to use the literal permissions of read/write, you may want to select files versus folders:

sudo find /var/www -type f -exec chmod 666 {} \;

(Which, by the way, for security reasons, I wouldn't recommend either of these.)

Or for folders:

sudo find /var/www -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
lurker
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  • Or `sudo find /var/www -type f -exec chmod o+rw {} \;` but it's still a terrible idea security wise. – Elliott Frisch Apr 23 '14 at 18:12
  • @ElliottFrisch yes that would be preferred for changing permissions to `o+rw` on just files. And I agree about the security! – lurker Apr 23 '14 at 18:14
  • Good call on separating between files/folders. I assumed that he wanted the 'other' user to be able to write files into each dir, but that might not be the case. –  Apr 23 '14 at 18:15
-4

Add -R for recursive:

sudo chmod -R 666 /var/www
lurker
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user973783
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    Incorrect. This will overwrite anything he had set on user/group and set it to rw. This will break `cd`-ing into directories. –  Apr 23 '14 at 18:11
  • Yo man.. don't use "/"+sudo at anytime. Once I have destroyed a whole server running 10 websites by changing permission for whole directory. Give the folder name appropriately. – Ganesh Babu Apr 11 '16 at 09:37