How to check file permissions via SSH

As a refinement to David Spillett's answer, how about using a single find command? I think it's a bit cleaner than all the pipes, and calls to grep. Furthemore, it cuts out a bit of the edge cases where this might blow up.

find . -type f ! -perm 644 should find every file that doesn't have -rw-r--r-- permissions. For directories, you can use find . -type d ! -perm 755.

Once you're happy with what you're seeing, you can even combine the chmod into the same command:

find . -type f ! -perm 644 -exec chmod 644 {} \;
find . -type d ! -perm 755 -exec chmod 755 {} \;

find . -type f | xargs ls -l | grep -v rw-r--r--

"find all files in current directory, pass to "ls -l" to list their detail, and scan the output of ls for all the lines not (the -v option to grep negates the match) containing "rw-r--r--" and for directories:

find . -type d | xargs ls -l | grep -v drw-r--r--

If you want to scan another directory replace "." with it, such as:

find /path/to/directory -type f | xargs ls -l | grep -v rw-r--r--

and if some of the file/directory names might contain spaces use the "use 0-delimited strings" options in find and xargs like so to avoid errors:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls -l | grep -v rw-r--r--

Also, you can remove the -v option from grep to find files/directories that do match, if you want to list these as a sanity check.

Using find will scan subdirectories too by default. To scan just one directory and not its children, you could just pipe the output of ls -l through grep instead of using find and xargs.

When you do run chmod remember that you can specify the -v option so it will list what it does and doesn't change as it performs the operation - this can be useful for reassuring yourself that you've given the right command.