Ubuntu – Using pscp and getting permission denied

Your command does not work because the redirection is performed by your shell which does not have the permission to write to /root/test.out. The redirection of the output is not performed by sudo.

There are multiple solutions:

• Run a shell with sudo and give the command to it by using the -c option:

  sudo sh -c 'ls -hal /root/ > /root/test.out'
  

• Create a script with your commands and run that script with sudo:

  #!/bin/sh
  ls -hal /root/ > /root/test.out
  

  Run sudo ls.sh. See Steve Bennett's answer if you don't want to create a temporary file.

• Launch a shell with sudo -s then run your commands:

  [nobody@so]$ sudo -s
  [root@so]# ls -hal /root/ > /root/test.out
  [root@so]# ^D
  [nobody@so]$
  

• Use sudo tee (if you have to escape a lot when using the -c option):

  sudo ls -hal /root/ | sudo tee /root/test.out > /dev/null
  

  The redirect to /dev/null is needed to stop tee from outputting to the screen. To append instead of overwriting the output file (>>), use tee -a or tee --append (the last one is specific to GNU coreutils).

Thanks go to Jd, Adam J. Forster and Johnathan for the second, third and fourth solutions.

The other answers are correct, in that chmod -R 755 will set these permissions to all files and subfolders in the tree. But why on earth would you want to? It might make sense for the directories, but why set the execute bit on all the files?

I suspect what you really want to do is set the directories to 755 and either leave the files alone or set them to 644. For this, you can use the find command. For example:

To change all the directories to 755 (drwxr-xr-x):

find /opt/lampp/htdocs -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

To change all the files to 644 (-rw-r--r--):

find /opt/lampp/htdocs -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

Some splainin': ^{(thanks @tobbez)}

• chmod 755 {} specifies the command that will be executed by find for each directory
• chmod 644 {} specifies the command that will be executed by find for each file
• {} is replaced by the path
• ; the semicolon tells find that this is the end of the command it's supposed to execute
• \; the semicolon is escaped, otherwise it would be interpreted by the shell instead of find