Doing more than one thing at once with find(1)

[Conor P. Cahill]

In article <2578 at rodan.acs.syr.edu> jdpeek at rodan.acs.syr.edu (Jerry Peek) writes:
>    $ find . \( -type f -exec chmod 600 {} \; \) -o \
>	\( -type d -exec chmod 700 {} \; \) 
>
>Even though I've found this, and it seems to work, I still don't
>completely understand it.  It's sort of like trying to program the
>Bourne shell just by reading the sh(1) man page. :-) [:-( ?]

The reson for this working the way it does is that there is an implied AND
between each pair of operators.  This AND acts the same was as the && in C (it
is a short circut operator, if the first part is not true, the second part is
not examined/executed).

In older finds you had to do something like:

     $ find . \( -type f -a -exec chmod 600 {} \; \) -o \
 	\( -type d -a -exec chmod 700 {} \; \) 

Note the -a for specifying the and.

Now that we are done with find, I guess I'll comment on your mechanism for
changing the mode of your files.  A much faster way would be to do the
following:

	find . -type f -print | xargs chmod 600
	find . -type d -print | xargs chmod 700

Or you could do it all at once with:

	find . -type f -print | xargs chmod u+rw,g-rwx,o-rwx

Of course this assumes that 

	1. you have xargs(1)
	2. you already had the search bit on for the user(owner) position of
	   the directory modes.


-- 
Conor P. Cahill            (703)430-9247        Virtual Technologies, Inc.,
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