CRON for File Permissions

[Frank Hagan]

I have a photo posting script that sometimes does not give the right permissions to photos, and they cannot be seen. The fix is easy enough; I go in and change the permissions to 644, and all is well. But it takes manual intervention.

I'm wondering if there's a way to make a cron job that I run weekly to change the file permissions of all files in a specific directory to rw-r--r-- I'm just not sure of the syntax that would take ... something like "chmod rw-r--r-- home/public_html/directory/*.*" perhaps?

[Amitabh]

Would be better if you pass in the complete path:

/bin/chmod -R 644 /home/<insert_user_name>/public_html/<directory_name>

or for a single file

/bin/chmod 644 /home/<insert_user_name>/public_html/<directory_name>/<file_name>

[Frank Hagan]

I logged into a ssh session using Putty, and tried using:

/bin/chmod -R 644 /home/<myusername>/public_html/<directory>

to test the syntax out. While it lists all the files, it gives a "permission denied" message on each one, so it doesn't change the permissions. Not sure why this is happening; I know the username is correct, as I'm logged in under it.

[Frank Hagan]

Anyone know why this won't work from a SSH login?

/bin/chmod -R 644 /home/<insert_user_name>/public_html/<directory_name>

I don't want to set up a cron job with something I haven't verfied (been there, done that, learned what "suspended" means when the script went berserk!)

Am I missing /usr/ in front or something?

[AndrewT]

Is it reporting an error or anything? That should work just fine.

[Frank Hagan]

Yep, its giving me a "failed to get attributes of" message, lists the file in the directory, and then has a "permission denied" message. It lists each of the files in the directory, so I know its finding them.

[AndrewT]

Submit a trouble ticket with the exact command you are trying to run along with your SSH user/pass.

[Frank Hagan]

As usual, the problem was quickly solved with a trouble ticket. Actually, the easy part was. My command string should have had an asterik on the end of it:

NOT:
/bin/chmod -R 644 /home/<insert_user_name>/public_html/<directory_name>

But this format:
/bin/chmod -R 644 /home/<insert_user_name>/public_html/<directory_name>/*

The command still has trouble because of the number of files in the directory. I'll have to look at the script and see if I can move some of the files without manually editing the 2000 image paths!

The script I'm using is Photopost, and it has to be the worst script, especially since I paid the most for it, and the authors are less than helpful. I would love it if I could convert the pics to Goldmine. I may have to do that manually.