How do you recursively adjust file and directory permissions?

Using Joomla! Administration

In the Back-end, go to Site --> Global Configuration --> Server.

Using the UNIX shell

Note: The find command automatically assumes that it should start from the current directory. To be safe, go to your public_html directory and specify a path as the first argument. Some shells, such as bash on Apple OS X, must have a path specified in the find command.

find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
chmod 707 images
chmod 707 images/stories
chown apache:apache cache

Notes:

1. Test all third party extensions after changing permissions.
2. You may need to reset write permissions to install more extensions.