=over =item chmod LIST X X X Changes the permissions of a list of files. The first element of the list must be the numeric mode, which should probably be an octal number, and which definitely should I be a string of octal digits: C<0644> is okay, but C<"0644"> is not. Returns the number of files successfully changed. See also L|/oct EXPR> if all you have is a string. my $cnt = chmod 0755, "foo", "bar"; chmod 0755, @executables; my $mode = "0644"; chmod $mode, "foo"; # !!! sets mode to # --w----r-T my $mode = "0644"; chmod oct($mode), "foo"; # this is better my $mode = 0644; chmod $mode, "foo"; # this is best On systems that support L, you may pass filehandles among the files. On systems that don't support L, passing filehandles raises an exception. Filehandles must be passed as globs or glob references to be recognized; barewords are considered filenames. open(my $fh, "<", "foo"); my $perm = (stat $fh)[2] & 07777; chmod($perm | 0600, $fh); You can also import the symbolic C constants from the L|Fcntl> module: use Fcntl qw( :mode ); chmod S_IRWXU|S_IRGRP|S_IXGRP|S_IROTH|S_IXOTH, @executables; # Identical to the chmod 0755 of the example above. Portability issues: L. =back