find - chmod of 400,000 files inside multiple subdirectories?

Howdy... I'm looking to chmod 777 a whole bunch of files. Alternatively, since it's more secure, I could also settle for a chown www:www of these files to make them web accessible.

Now, since I have over 400,000 files, sudo chmod -R 777 ./* and sudo chown -R www:www ./* didn't work at all, returning only with "Arg list too long"

Some googling turned up find and xargs, but this didn't quite work for my file set, since some of the files had underscores in the name. I'm not sure why this would break the script, but it did. The command:

find ./ -name "*" | xargs chmod 777

Here's an anonymized snippet of the directory tree:

files

\- 28934723
   \- file1.xml
   \- file2.txt
\- 34905834
   \- file1.xml
   \- file2.txt
\- 21398230
   \- file1.xml
   \- file2.txt

As far as I can tell from man find, it should recurse into subdirectories automatically, but I am not sure. When I ran the above command, some of the files changed, but the majority of the directories remained the same (same permissions).

Thanks in advance for any help you guys can offer :)

Answer

sudo chown -R www:www ./ and if you don't want the directory owned by www, just change it back.