rper

A quick and easy POSIX-compliant utility for unix based operating systems, to recursively change permissions of directories, and/or files

Installation • Updating • Features • Contributing

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Installation

Prerequisites:

• Ensure you have gcc installed on your unix-based system (or your favourite C compiler).

Building or Downloading:

1. Download or clone the repository with git clone https://github.com/dhitchenor/rper
2. Unzip, and/or change into the appropriate directory
3. build using the command: gcc -o rper rper.c
   • You should now have a built utility (binary) in the current folder called rper
   • the provided binary was created using the following command: gcc -o rper rper_0.2.c -Wall -Wextra -Werror -Wformat -Wformat-security -Wconversion -Wsign-conversion -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -fstack-protector-strong -fPIE -pie -Wl,-z,relro,-z,now -O2

Incorporating into your system:

1. Move the utility into your operating systems bin directory, eg. /usr/local/bin/

• example command (assuming you are currently in the same directory as the built utility): sudo mv rper /usr/local/bin/
• an alternative is to symlink the binary; for example ln -s ./rper/rper /usr/bin/rper

Important

If you don't wish to incorporate the binary into your system, you will need to be in the directory that contains the utility to use it, and you will need to run the utility similiarly to the following command:

./rper -p 644 /some/other/directory

Updating

Updating is just a matter of replacing the built utility/binary with an updated binary

Tip

Use whereis rper to find where any previous versions of rper are installed, then overwrite the old binary using the instructions above as a guide

Features

files (-f):

• makes the desired permissions changes to files only
• retained as the default flag if the directories flag (-d) is not used

directories (-d):

• makes the desired permissions changes to directories only
• can be used with the files flag (-f), if you wish to change directories and files to identical permissions (might not be what you want, use caution)

inclusive (-i):

• includes the specified directory (directory argument) when making permission changes
• can only be used with the directories flag (-d), has no effect when used with the files flag (-f)

non-recursive (-n):

• only makes changes to the files/directories within the specified directory (directory argument).. essentially the basic use of the chmod command

quiet (-s):

• suppresses normal output, but still displays any error output

silenced (-S):

• suppresses all output, including errors

verbose (-v):

• displays all output; both directory and file changes are provided in output

follow symlinks (-L):

• follows symlinks
• does not error when symlink is found

error on symlink (-k):

• does not follow symlinks, does not continue if symlink found
• error produced when symlnk found

permissions (-p):

• uses an octal formatted argument (eg. 755 or 0644) as the desired changed permissions.
• allows the use of () as a wildcard, eg 64 will change the user (left-most), and others (right-most) permissions, but not the group(center) permission

help (-h | -H):

• displays help for the user

about (-a):

• displays information about rper

Contributing

Tip

Start an issue or file a PR; make sure any code changes are well commented.

rper To-do:

• process the leading number in a 4 digit octal value, instead of stripping
• rwx notation output (flag -c); allows use of rwx notation, instead of numerical values. i.e rper -p rwxr-xr-x ./change/this/to/sevenfivefive/permissions