Is there a one line command to make chmod interactive?

I am looking for something like:

ls | ask_yes_no_for_each_file | chmod +x the_files_approved

Or similar syntax.

Also could work on other commands that you want individual confirmation for.

This does what you are looking for:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -print0 | xargs -L1 -p0 chmod +x

This uses find rather than ls because, generally, parsing ls output is unreliable. This form, using find, however, will work with filenames even if they contain newlines or other difficult characters.

Explanation

• find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -print0

  This selects the files. This can be customized using any of find's many options. The option print0 tells find to print the file names in a null-separated list. This is the only reliable to transmit lists of file names.

• xargs -L1 -p0 chmod +x

  This takes the null-separated list of file names generated by find and applies your command to them.

The -L1 option tells xargs to work on only one file name at a time. The -p option tells xargs to prompt for approval before continuing. The -0 option tells xargs to use the null character as the delimiter between file names.

[I was unaware of the -p option to xargs until @kwan pointed it out.]

You can use xargs.

eg:

ls|xargs -I path -p chmod +x path

Option -p: Prompt the user about whether to run each command line and read a line from the terminal. Only run the command line if the response starts with 'y' or 'Y'.