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UNIX tip o' the day

I never knew that the +X mode for chmod meant set the execute bit only if a directory or if the execute bit is already set on a file.

Up until now I had been using a wierd combo of chmod -R [whatever]</em> followed by find . -type d | xargs chmod +x to reset permissions on a directory hierarchy. Now I will just use chmod -R +X.

This will save me literally seconds of typing!

And the gnu tools keep adding really useful command line switches, two I noticed recently are the grep -r which searches recursively and tar -j that uncompresses bzip2 files.