Working one file at a time reduces the possibility that something changes in the filesystem between when you see the file and change the permission. It also means that there is no upper limit on how many files you can handle.

Working with a list of files and letting chmod do the loop is probably faster than looping over chmod statements. But if your list of files is very large, you could run out of memory. (Very unlikely, but there is a theoretical limit there.)

Personally I would suggest working with whatever style fits the surrounding code the best. With File::Find that would be one file at a time, just do the chmod in the callback.

(Actually I would be inclined to go to the shell and just do a chmod -R ..., but it sounds like you have been down that route...)

In reply to Re (tilly) 1: Limitations to chmod and performance by tilly
in thread Limitations to chmod and performance by stefan k

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.