find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} ;

why doesn't this work I am trying to change all files to 644 abd all -d to 755:

find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} ;

i get: find: missing argument to `-exec' thanks

Piping to xargs is a dirty way of doing that which can be done inside of find.

find . -type d -exec chmod 0755 {} \;
find . -type f -exec chmod 0644 {} \;

You can be even more controlling with other options, such as:

find . -type d -user harry -exec chown daisy {} \;

You can do some very cool things with find and you can do some very dangerous things too. Have a look at "man find", it's long but is worth a quick read. And, as always remember:

• If you are root it will succeed.
• If you are in root (/) you are going to have a bad day.
• Using /path/to/directory can make things a lot safer as you are clearly defining where you want find to run.

A good alternative is this:

find . -type f | xargs chmod -v 644

and for directories:

find . -type d | xargs chmod -v 755

and to be more explicit:

find . -type f | xargs -I{} chmod -v 644 {}

I need this so often that I created a function in my ~/.bashrc file:

chmodf() {
        find $2 -type f -exec chmod $1 {} \;
}
chmodd() {
        find $2 -type d -exec chmod $1 {} \;
}

Now I can use these shortcuts:

chmodd 0775 .
chmodf 0664 .