What is chmod 777?

chmod 777 is very popular ownership command. 777 simply means give all rights to the all users. chmod 777 generally used to make operations more smoothly because it will remove all ownership related problems. We generally use chmod 777 some error message like below.

You don't have permission to access /bin/ on this server.

All Files and Directories Recursively

One of the most popular use case for chmod 777 is changing given directory and child directories permission recursively. We can use -R option for this. In this example, we will change all directory named bin and its subdirectories and files to 777.

$ chmod -R 777 /bin

chmod 777 with sudo

We may need root privileges. In these situations we should use sudo to get root privileges during the command execution.

$ sudo chmod -R 777 bin

Security Problems

Now it provides a lot of flexibility but running chmod 777 will create security problems. This will make all given files and directories read, write, and executable by all of the users. A user can change a system binary and escalate its credentials.