How do I find all files and directories writable by a specific user?

Solution 1:

Use the 'find' command if you have findutils version 4.3.0 or greater installed:

For all files under the current directory that are writable by the current user:

find . -writable

For all files under the current directory that are not writable by the current user:

find . ! -writable

According to the man page:

This test makes use of the access(2) system call, and so can be fooled by NFS servers which do UID mapping (or root-squashing), since many systems implement access(2) in the client’s kernel and so cannot make use of the UID mapping information held on the server.

Solution 2:

You can create a Perl script (writable.pl) like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

sub recurse {
  my $path = shift;
  my @files = glob "$path/{*,.*}";
  for my $file (@files) {
    if (-d $file) {
      if ($file !~ /\/\.$/ && $file !~ /\/\.\.$/) {
        recurse($file);
      }
    } else {
      print "$file\n" if -w $file;
    }
  }
}

print "Writable files for " . getlogin() . "\n";
recurse($ARGV[0]);

and then use this script, as root, as follows:

su USERNAME -c "./writable.pl DIRECTORY"

filling in USERNAME and DIRECTORY as appropriate.

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Solution 3:

This command should find all writable directories, you can change the permissions as you see fit:

find / -type d \( -perm -g+w -or -perm -o+w \) -exec ls -adl {} \;