Re: changing permissions of files in directories

[Cameron Hutchison <camh+dl@xdna.net>]

Once upon a time Colin Watson said...
> On Wed, Oct 08, 2003 at 10:04:01AM +0000, Adam wrote:
> > On Wednesday 08 October 2003 08:00, Lukas Ruf wrote:
> > > find <path> -type f | xargs chmod 0644
> > 
> > I would have come up with
> > 
> > find PATH -type f -exec chmod 0644 '{}' ';'
> > 
> > Is the version with xargs better, and how?
> 
> The version with xargs is much better: it runs a single instance of
> chmod with all the files (or as many as will fit) as arguments, rather
> than running a separate instance of chmod for every file.

I use xargs because its easier to type, so I can type it faster.

> The downside is that you can only use xargs this way for programs that
> let you specify an arbitrary number of filenames lasting up to the end
> of the command line. 

xargs -n 1 <command>

will limit xargs to running the command with 1 argument

In response to the original question, if you dont want to recurse into
all the subdirectories, use -maxdepth 1:

$ find . -type f -maxdepth 1 | xargs chmod 644