Bash script to fix file permissions recursively
I love the redhat implementation of cron, simply drop a shell script into /etc/cron.daily/ and your script will be executed every day (by default at 4am).
Recently I’ve been having a small problem with mediatomb, further investigation lead me to a “Inotify thread caught exception” error which can be fixed by recursively resetting your file permissions.
What I have done to fix the issue is save the following code as /etc/cron.daily/fix_mt.sh and ‘jobs a gooden’ 
#!/bin/bash
# Load up your mediatomb directories...
MediaTombDirectories[0]="/home/me/Videos"
MediaTombDirectories[1]="/home/me/Music"
# add more if needbe
# MediaTombDirectories[2]="/home/me/files"
# Setup find correctly.
export IFS=$'\n'
# Loop through our array.
for x in ${MediaTombDirectories[@]}
do
# Find all directories & subdirectories
for i in $(find $x -type d)
do
# Fix Permissions
chmod -c 775 $i
chown -c me:user $i
done
# Find all Files
for i in $(find $x -type f)
do
# Fix Permissions
chmod -c 664 $i
chown -c me:user $i
done
done
Quick tip: You (or root) will get e-mailed every time this executes, you can make the script more verbos by changing all “-c” to “-v“, or make it silent by removing the “-c” altogether.
Enjoy!
[...] Based on an example Bash script by linickx.com [...]
Your script is buggy – it does not handle file names with spaces.
try something like this
find ~/ -type f -exec chmod 600 ‘{}’ \;
or you can always use find … -print0 | xargs -0