Changing permissions on multiple files - not built into Leopard?

Thanks for the reply. I'm going to try the option key thing in a few minutes. Could you please explain how I would use terminal to add Read permission to 20 mp4 files in folder Shared/Videos, when there are other files in that folder that I don't want modified?

My understanding is that it would be something like this (not sure of the exact syntax):

- Open Terminal (I like to use Spotlight to open most apps, so this part would be pretty quick)
- cd to Shared/Movies (not sure exactly where terminal would start and how deep it is to get to the Videos folder)
- chmod +r Daughter "High School Musical 3 - Senior Year (AppleTV).mp4" "Shrek 3 (AppleTV).mp4" "Princess Diaries (AppleTV).mp4" "File4 With a Long Name.mp4" "File5 With a Long Name.mp4" "File6 With a Long Name.mp4" "File7 With a Long Name.mp4".....................................................................

That sure is a lot of typing. 🙂

Thanks!
Gary

Thanks for the reply. I'm going to try the option key thing in a few minutes. Could you please explain how I would use terminal to add Read permission to 20 mp4 files in folder Shared/Videos, when there are other files in that folder that I don't want modified?

My understanding is that it would be something like this (not sure of the exact syntax):

- Open Terminal (I like to use Spotlight to open most apps, so this part would be pretty quick)
- cd to Shared/Movies (not sure exactly where terminal would start and how deep it is to get to the Videos folder)
- chmod +r Daughter "High School Musical 3 - Senior Year (AppleTV).mp4" "Shrek 3 (AppleTV).mp4" "Princess Diaries (AppleTV).mp4" "File4 With a Long Name.mp4" "File5 With a Long Name.mp4" "File6 With a Long Name.mp4" "File7 With a Long Name.mp4".....................................................................

That sure is a lot of typing. 🙂

Thanks!
Gary

Thanks for your reply.

Your first suggestion would work if these files were the only videos in the folder, but what if I have other videos in there that I DO NOT want my daughter to open? I could set them all to add Read for her using this method, then remove Read on the "restricted" files individually, but once again, that's not very intuitive or elegant. I could use separate folders to hold files with common permissions among them, but isn't that the whole reason for file permissions...to enable and restrict access on a file by file basis?

I didn't mean to imply that I was expecting the windows permissions to be on the files...i realize that wouldn't happen. I just figured that creating a new file in FolderX would inherit FolderX's permissions, not those of the user creating the file. I'm also assuming that FolderX (Shared/Videos in this case) would have generic read/write permissions since it's a "shared" location on the hard drive.

Your last point assumes that I want these files only available to my daughter, but me or my wife might want to watch them under our accounts. 🙂 Once again, I'm trying to utilize the concept of "shared."

Thanks!
Gary

Aha! That's clever.

Thanks!

PS...Sorry about my previous double post...I didn't see the note about it taking a few minutes to appear in the thread. 🙂

The Option key suggestion works great! I've learned a few things while trying out this method...

- If you select multiple files in a finder window and press cmd optioni, you get a Multiple Item Info inspector, and the bottom section allows you to set the permissions for those items. This is EXACTLY what I was looking for...thanks!!!

- If one of the selected items is a folder, you cannot change the permissions in the Multiple Item Info inspector. The Sharing & Permissions section just says "You can read and write."

- The inspector is dynamic in that it will update as you select/deselect items in the finder window...Windows doesn't do that! 🙂 It also updates dynamically for a single selected file.

Thanks for your help, Barney.