Find specific folders and then change their ownership

Question

I'm running into security issues with multiple Wordpress websites, and I need to recursively change the ownership (and permissions) for folder "wp-content" (and whatever is inside them).

I need to find all the folders named wp-content (there are several) and change them and all their contents so that they're owned by nginx:nginx with permissions 755 for folders and 644 for files.

I can't figure out a way to find those folders and then change the ownership.

Any clues? :/

Answer 1

You could use GNU find and GNU xargs to search for the wp-content directories and pass the result NUL-terminated to a shell script:

find /path/to/directory -type d -name 'wp-content' -print0 | xargs -0 sh -c '
  for dir; do
    # change user and group recursively to nginx
    chown -R nginx:nginx "$dir"

    # change dirs to 755
    find "$dir" -type d -exec chmod 755 {} +

    # change files to 644
    find "$dir" -type f -exec chmod 644 {} +
  done
' sh

---

Alternatively, you could save the script part in a shell script myscript.sh:

#!/bin/sh

for dir; do
  # change user and group recursively to nginx
  chown -R nginx:nginx "$dir"

  # change dirs to 755
  find "$dir" -type d -exec chmod 755 {} +

  # change files to 644
  find "$dir" -type f -exec chmod 644 {} +
done

Then make the shell script executable with

chmod +x myscript.sh

and run find (not necessarily the GNU implementation) using the -exec action and pass the result to the script:

find /path/to/directory -type d -name 'wp-content' -exec ./myscript.sh {} +

Answer 2

You could do something like:

LC_ALL=C find . '(' -name wp-content -type d -o \
                    -path '*/wp-content/*' '(' -type d -o -type f ')' \
                ')' -exec chown nginx:nginx {} + \
                    -exec chmod u=rwX,g=rX,o=rX {} +

That way, you're crawling the directory only once and running as few invocations of chown and chmod as necessary and only changing the ownership/permissions of directory and regular files (excluding symlinks, devices, fifos...).

With some find implementations, you can simplify '(' -type d -o -type f ')' to -type f,d.

Answer 3

It can be done using below command as well.

find some-folder-path -type d -name wp-content -exec chown new-user:new-group {} \;

The above command will change ownership and group of all folders having name wp-content.

find some-folder-path -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find some-folder-path -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

The above command will change permission of files to 644 and of folders to 755.