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Given the following directory tree:

.

├── d1

│   └── workspace

├── d2

│   └── workspace

├── d3

│   └── workspace

├── d4

│   └── workspace

└── d5

    └── workspace

I need to set the permissions for all workspace directories as below:

chmod -R 774 d1/workspace

chmod -R 774 d2/workspace

...

How can I do the above operations in one command for all workspace directories? I can run the following command:

chmod -R 774 *

But this also changes the mode of parent directories, which is not desired.

You can use wildcards on the top level directory.

chmod 774 d*/workspace

Or to make it more specific you can also limit the wildcard, for example to d followed by a single digit.

chmod 774 d[0-9]/workspace

A more general approach could be with find.

find d* -maxdepth 1 -name workspace -type d -exec chmod 774 "{}" ;

In a shell like bash you can use its extended its globbing option to first mark all the directories named workspace and chmod it in one shot

shopt -s nullglob globstar

The option nullglob is make sure the glob expansion does not throw any error when it does not find any files in the path. Also this will ensure the empty glob string is not included as part of the array. The globstar option is enabled for recursive globbing.

Now mark those directories in a shell array as

dirs=(**/workspace/)

As one more sanity check, you could first print the array to see if all the directories required are taken care. See if all the directories are listed below when you do the below printf() command,

printf '%sn' "${dirs[@]}"

This will populate the array with all recursive workspace folders, now we need to use chmod on it

(( "${#dirs[@]}" )) && chmod -R 774 -- "${dirs[@]}"

The chmod command has a nice shortcut for setting the executable bit only on directories, like so:

chmod a+X *

This is very handy to make a whole directory tree readable by anyone, but not setting the executable bit on any regular files:

chmod -R a+rX *

find . -mindepth 1 -type d -exec chmod 774 {} ;