Folder Permissions in Terminal

[hyperpasta]

Hello,

I am writing this on my shiny new 24" iMac.

My old G5 broke, and rather than doing a full recover from the Time Machine Hard Drive, I decided to start from scratch, importing only the files I need. The problem is that this completely screwed up all my permissions. Most of my folders are read only. I can fix permissions for folders one at a time, and I can apply the permissions to the folder's immediate contents, but this is tedious and does not seem to fix deeply nested folders.

So the question is:

Is there something I can type into Terminal that will give me Read & Write access to every folder, folder within a folder, folder within a folder within a folder, etc. in my home directory? I am a complete Terminal novice.

 

[angelwatt]

I believe this should do it.

chmod 755 folder/*

Just make sure to point the path correctly and only do it for documents and such, and not system files as it could have very adverse effects on your machine. For instance, don't apply this directory to your home folder as it could mess something up in your Library folder.

 

[RoninXI]

If you want to change something like your documents folder including everything in it

chmod -R 755 /Users/SHORTNAME/Documents

the -R means recursive (everything inside the folder) Make especially sure you don't do this to your home folder like angelwatt said. This would change your Library folder's contents as well.