File Operations

Table of Contents

Workings of file permissions

Change permissions

To change file permissions use chmod (-R) XXX [PATH]

XXX signify the permissions for the file's owner/group/others respectively

Each X goes from 0 to 7.
What each number means can be easily calculated by looking at what the individual bit values mean.

0 -> No Permission
4 -> Read Permission
2 -> Write Permission
1 -> Execute Permission

A value of 5 therefor gives the permissions "Read" and "Execute".

To enter a folder, you need the read as well as the execute permission!

Change user and group

Use chown to change the owner and group of a file or directory.
If you only want to change the user or the group, only specify the part left or right of : respectively.

Example:
chown (-R) [OWNER]:[GROUP] [PATH]

Find biggest files

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 du -s | sort -n | tail -[AMOUNT] | cut -f2 | xargs -I{} du -sh {}

find . -type f -printf "%s %p\n" | sort -nr | head -5