I love this hive employee

13 November 2007 21:50

Russell Coker wants something to save and restore file permissions en masse.

That exists already:

apt-get install acl

Once installed you can dump the filesystem permissions of, for example, /etc/ recursively with this:

 getfacl -R  /etc > orig.perms

Want to see what is different? First change something:

steve@steve:~$ sudo chmod 0 /etc/motd

Now see what would be restored:

setfacl --test -R --restore=./orig.perms /etc | grep -v "\*,\*"
etc/motd : u::rw-,g::r--,o::r--,*

Finally lets make it do the restoration:

steve:/# setfacl -R --restore=./orig.perms /etc

Job done.