Performing more than one search in one pass of 'find'

find is a utility that searches a directory tree for files matching complex conditions. The conditions may include file name, file type, creation/modification time, owner, permissions and others. Besides, you can define an action to be performed on the files that match your search criteria.

When I have to run a number of searches, I usually do it sequentially, but the process may take too much time if the number of files find has to inspect is very large. It turns out that you can define multiple sets of conditions in find and perform different actions on files that match different conditions. The utility will traverse the directory only once.

This is how you can define multiple conditions and actions in one pass of find:

find /data \( ! -group mygroup -exec chgrp mygroup {} \; \) , \
                   \( -type f ! -perm -g=rw -exec chmod g+rw {} \; \) , \
                   \( -type d ! -perm -g=rws -exec chmod g+rws {} \; \)

This command will change group owner for all files that do not belong to mygroup, set read and write permissions for the owning group if the file is a regular file, set read, write and setgid permissions if the file is a directory. All in a single pass.