chmod 777: how to make all files become "RWX"

Solution 1:

chmod -cR 777 *

Will change all the files including subdirectories recursively (R option) including subdirectories, but also report on when it makes a change (c option).

Rather than changing all the files with too wide permissions, you might want to change the ownership instead.

sudo chown -hR tomcat

The line above changes owndership to a tomcat application server, you need to figure out which user your webserver is using. You can easily see that by doing

ps aux

(The h option is for changing the owndership of a symbolic link if encountered, but not the files it linkes to)

Solution 2:

What you are doing is more than likely unsafe and the below command should only be invoked if you completely accept the security issues.

find . -type d -exec chmod 777 '{}'* \;

This will recursively go through the current directory and each subdirectory and change the permissions accordingly; if I haven't made it clear enough, this is a very bad idea (777 permissions)