Unix Commands That Come in Handy

Change permissions Recursively

For chmod and chown you can use the -R option. With -R it is possible to change files and directories recursively.  This will change the permissions of the testfolder and all files and subdirectories inside.

chmod -R 755 /testfolder

File Transfer via SSH

copy from a remote machine to my machine:

scp user@192.168.1.100:/remote_user/Desktop/file.txt /me/Desktop/file.txt

copy from my machine to a remote machine:

scp /me/Desktop/file.txt user@192.168.1.100:/remote_user/Desktop/file.txt

copy all file*.txt from a remote machine to my machine (file01.txt, file02.txt, etc.; note the quotation marks:

scp "user@192.168.1.100:/remote_user/Desktop/file*.txt" /me/Desktop/file.txt

copy a directory from a remote machien to my machine:

scp -r user@192.168.1.100:/remote_user/Desktop/files /me/Desktop/.