Linux: setup attributes based on type of entry(file or directory)

If you have to setup attributes on all directories from one tree, you can use 'find' and it's 'exec' argument or find and 'xargs'.

If you have a lot of directories, the preferred menthod is the second one, the ones that's using xargs:

[root@centos6::/var/www/html]# find . -type d | wc -l
2589
[root@centos6:/var/www/html]# time find . -type d -exec chmod 2775 {} \;

real    0m2.168s
user    0m0.046s
sys     0m0.321s
[root@centos6:/var/www/html]# time find . -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 2775

real    0m0.098s
user    0m0.021s
sys     0m0.078s

The same thing can be applied to files and, again, the preferred method is the second one:

[root@centos6:/var/www/html]# find . -type f | wc -l
7403
[root@centos6:/var/www/html]# time find . -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \;

real    0m6.081s
user    0m0.070s
sys     0m0.819s
[root@centos6:/var/www/html]# time find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 664

real    0m0.106s
user    0m0.024s
sys     0m0.137s