directories

How do you count the number of files in a directory? That becomes non-trivial if you have thousands of files in a directory. Your file manager chokes on counting them, especially if they are not local. On the Linux command line, this task is fast and easy:
ls | wc
ls lists your files one per row and wc returns three numbers: lines, words and bytes. In the file counting example, lines and words are the same and equal the number of files in the directory.

I recursively screwed up the file permissions in my html servers root directory. To fix it I needed to deploy some "advanced" chmod settings. Obviously I want to treat directories and files differently. I didn't come up with a better solution than the following:

chmod -R u=rw-x,g=rw-x,o=r-wx *
chmod -R a+X *