chom.md

Motivation

On multi-user systems and servers filesystem permissions can matter. Often one wants a restrictive umask (e.g. 077) for file/directory creation as a "safe default". Then sometimes you want to "open up" perms on some entire file sub-tree..say to collaborate with some other user.

While you can do chown -R there is no "only directories" filter or handle user-executable files differently option. One can do wrapper scripts with find, but using chom is more efficient for both users and the system. One can also do fancy Zsh recursive globbing like **(.x), but at least to me the ergonomics of chom are better than either of these options.

Usage

  chom [optional-params] [paths: string...]

This enforces {owner, group owner, permissions} for {dirs, non-executable other
files, and user-executable files}.  This only makes chown/chmod syscalls when
needed, both for speed & not to touch ctime unnecessarily.  It does not handle
ACLs, network FS defined access, etc.  Return zero if no calls are needed.

Options:
  -v, --verbose    bool   false print chown and chmod calls as they happen
  -q, --quiet      bool   false suppress most OS error messages
  -n, --dry-run    bool   false only print what system calls are needed
  -r=, --recurse=  int    0     max recursion depth for any dir in paths
  -c, --chase      bool   false follow symbolic links to dirs in recursion
  -x, --xdev       bool   false block recursion across device boundaries
  -o=, --owner=    string ""    owner to set; may need root; defl=self
  -g=, --group=    string ""    group owner to set; defl=primaryGid(self)
  -d=, --dirPerm=  Perm   2755  permission mask for dirs
  -f=, --filePerm= Perm   664   permission mask for files
  -e=, --execPerm= Perm   775   permission mask for u=x files