How to chmod and chown hidden files in Linux?

Question

How do I recursively execute chmod or chown for hidden files?

sudo chmod -R 775 * does not work on hidden files.

The same thing goes for sudo chown -R user:group.

Answer 1

If you're okay also chmod'ing the current directory, do that and let -R do the heavy lifting. -R does not ignore hidden files.

sudo chmod -R 775 .

Answer 2

* doesn't include hidden files by default, but if you're in bash, you can do this with:

shopt -s dotglob

Read more about it in bash's builtin manual:

If set, Bash includes filenames beginning with a `.' in the results of filename expansion.

This will make * include hidden files too.

chmod -R 775 *

Disable it with:

shopt -u dotglob

Answer 3

All files in the current directory, recursively, including hidden files:

chmod 755 -R ./* ./.[!.]*

All files in the current directory, not recursively, including hidden files:

chmod 755 ./* ./.[!.]*

This will not change an exception filename starting with 2 dots, as example, "./..thisonescapesunharmed.txt"

Also, be carefull not to remove the "x" bit, or else all your directories will not be accessible (one needs the x bit to cd into a dir).

Remember this alert: never use bare * but ./* instead.

To avoid problems setting permissions on directories, use find instead.

find . -type f -exec chmod `VALUE` {} \;

Answer 4

Another option is to use find i like it since you can have very fine grained control over it.

find <path to start from> -exec chown <options> {} \+

find -path '<path to include>' -exec chown <options> {} \+

The only downside is that find has different syntax on different versions.