I love this function because it tells me everything I want to know about files, more than stat, more than ls. It's very useful and infinitely expandable. find $PWD -maxdepth 1 -printf '%.5m %10M %#9u:%-9g %#5U:%-5G [%AD | %TD | %CD] [%Y] %p\n' | sort -rgbS 50% 00761 drwxrw---x askapache:askapache 777:666 [06/10/10 | 06/10/10 | 06/10/10] [d] /web/cg/tmp The key is: # -printf '%.5m %10M %#9u:%-9g %#5U:%-5G [%AD | %TD | %CD] [%Y] %p\n' which believe it or not took me hundreds of tweaking before I was happy with the output. You can easily use this within a function to do whatever you want.. This simple function works recursively if you call it with -r as an argument, and sorts by file permissions. lsl(){ O="-maxdepth 1";sed -n '/-r/!Q1'<<<$@ &&O=;find $PWD $O -printf '%.5m %10M %#9u:%-9g %#5U:%-5G [%AD | %TD | %CD] [%Y] %p\n'|sort -rgbS 50%; } Personally I'm using this function because: lll () { local a KS="1 -r -g"; sed -n '/-sort=/!Q1' <<< $@ && KS=`sed 's/.*-sort=\(.*\)/\1/g'<<<$@`; find $PWD -maxdepth 1 -printf '%.5m %10M %#9u:%-9g %#5U:%-5G [%AD | %TD | %CD] [%Y] %p\n'|sort -k$KS -bS 50%; } # i can sort by user lll -sort=3 # or sort by group reversed lll -sort=4 -r # and sort by modification time lll -sort=6 If anyone wants to help me make this function handle multiple dirs/files like ls, go for it and I would appreciate it.. Something very minimal would be awesome.. maybe like: for a; do lll $a; done Note this uses the latest version of GNU find built from source, easy to build from gnu ftp tarball. Taken from my http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html Show Sample Output

Sometimes a program refuses to read a file and you're not sure why. You may have display_errors turned off for PHP or something. In this example, fopen('/var/www/test/foo.txt') was called but doesn't have read access to foo.txt. Strace can tell you what went wrong. E.g., if php doesn't have read access to the file, strace will say "EACCESS (Permission denied)". Or, if the file path you gave doesn't exist, strace will say "ENOENT (No such file or directory)", etc. This works for any program you can run from the command-line, e.g., strace python myapp.py -e open,access... Note: the above command uses php-cli, not mod_php, which is a different SAPI with diff configs, etc. Show Sample Output

I sometimes (due to mismanagement!) end up with files in a git repo which have had their modes changed, but not their content. This one-liner lets me revert the mode changes, while leaving changed-content files be, so I can commit just the actual changes made.

If you copy windows file in e.g. cygwin the ACL might miss on the copied file. With this command you can copy the ACL of an existing file to another. WARNING: Existing ACL will get lost. Show Sample Output

Have a grudge against someone on your network? Do a "find -writable" in their directory and see what you can vandalize! But seriously, this is really useful to check the files in your own home directory to make sure they can't inadvertently be changed by someone else's wayward script.

#Alias alias perm="stat -c '%n %U:%G-%a'" #Function perm() { for ll in $@; do stat -c "%n %U:%G-%a" "$ll"; done; } Show Sample Output

Since the original command (#1873) didn't work on FreeBSD whose stat lacks the "-c" switch, I wrote an alternative that does. This command shows also the fourth digit of octal format permissions which yields the sticky bit information. Show Sample Output

Only shows files with actual changes to text (excluding whitespace). Useful if you've messed up permissions or transferred in files from windows or something like that, so that you can get a list of changed files, and clean up the rest.

The above command will set the GID bit on all directories named .svn in the current directory recursively. This makes the group ownership of all .svn folders be the group ownership for all files created in that folder, no matter the user. This is useful for me as the subversion working directory on my server is also the live website and needs to be auto committed to subversion every so often via cron as well as worked on by multiple users. Setting the GID bit on the .svn folders makes sure we don't have a mix of .svn metadata created by a slew of different users.

suspicious/anomalous ownership may indicate system breach; should return no results

-x, --extract, --get extract files from an archive -p, --preserve-permissions, --same-permissions extract information about file permissions (default for superuser) -f, --file=ARCHIVE use archive file or device ARCHIVE -v, --verbose verbosely list files processed

Can easily be scripted in order to show permission "tree" from any folder. Can also be formated with column -t { pushd .> /dev/null; cd /; for d in `echo $OLDPWD | sed -e 's/\// /g'`; do cd $d; echo -n "$d "; ls -ld .; done; popd >/dev/null ; } | column -t from http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/3731/using-column-to-format-a-directory-listing Show Sample Output

Helps to fix permissions when a user clobbers them in their home directory or elsewhere. Does not rely on file extension, but uses the `file` command for context.

Example of using zsh glob qualifier ... "." = files "f:" = files with access rights matching: o+w = other plus write

Permission modes are noted as following: 7 read, write and execute rwx 6 read and write rw- 5 read and execute r-x 4 read only r-- 3 write and execute -wx 2 write only -w- 1 execute only --x 0 none --- The 'execute' permission when set on a directory means 'allow entering directory' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modes_%28Unix%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chmod http://www.tutorialspoint.com/unix/unix-file-permission.htm

This is equivalent to $chmod 754 /path/to/file The 3 first symbol represent permissions for the file's owner (read/write/execute). Symbols 4-5-6 represent permissions for the file's group (read/write) Symboles 7-8-9 represent permissions for other users (read-only) Owner permissions can be altered with $chmod u+rw (give r/w permissions) Group permissions can be altered with $chmod g-w (remove write permission) Other users' permissions can be altered with $chmod o-rwx (remove r/w/execute permissions) Permissions for ALL can be altered with $chmod a+rwx (give everyone full permissions)

Handled all within awk. Takes the value from $PWD and constructs directory structures and runs commands against them. The gsub() call is not necessary, but added for better visibility. If a variable DIR is given on the awk command-line, then that directory is used instead: awk -vDIR=$HOME/.ssh 'BEGIN{dir=DIR?...}' Show Sample Output

This example code is intended to be used as a root permissions check in a script. It makes use of the $EUID (effective user ID) environment variable which is fully su- and sudo-safe.

Install with `npm install unix-permissions`. https://github.com/ehmicky/unix-permissions Unix file permissions can take many shapes: symbolic (`ug+rw`), octal (`660`) or a list of characters (`drw-rw----`). `unix-permissions` enables using any of these (instead of being limited to a single one) with any CLI command. Show Sample Output