Before doing anything in Linux, it is also smart to have a rollback plan. Making blanket, recursive permission changes on a directory would certainly fall into this category!
Lets say you found a directory on your system where the file permissions were all 777, so you want to secure them a bit by changing the permissions over to 644. Something like:
[root@web01 ~]# find /var/www/vhosts/domain.com -type f -perm 0777 -print -exec chmod 644 {} \;
The paranoid among us will want to ensure we can revert things back to the way they were before. Thankfully there are two commands that can be used to either backup or restore permissions on a directory recursively: getfacl and setfacl
To backup all the permissions and ownerships within a given directory such as /var/www/vhosts/domain.com, do the following:
[root@web01 ~]# cd /var/www/vhosts/domain.com [root@web01 ~]# getfacl -R . > permissions_backup
Now lets say you ran the find command, changed everything over to 644, then realized you broke your application cause it needed some files to be 664 or something, so you just want to roll back so you can investigate what happened.
You can roll back the permissions by running:
[root@web01 ~]# cd /var/www/vhosts/domain.com [root@web01 ~]# setfacl --restore=permissions_backup
Backup entire servers permissions
If you wanted to backup the entire server’s permissions, you can do that by:
[root@web01 ~]# getfacl -R --absolute-names / > server_permissions_backup
And the restoration process remains the same:
[root@web01 ~]# setfacl --restore=server_permissions_backup