p3m — Parallel POSIX Permission Manager

A set of high-performance command line tools for Linux that parallelise traditionally single-threaded file system operations (permission changes, ownership changes, and related metadata work) across large directory trees.

Why

Standard coreutils such as chmod -R and chown -R walk the tree and issue system calls from a single thread. On directory trees with tens of thousands of files — especially on network or high-latency storage — the wall-clock time is dominated by serialised metadata operations. The p3m tools use multiple worker threads to walk and modify the tree concurrently, keeping many operations in flight at once.

Tools

Tool	Description	Docs
p3m-ls	Parallel recursive directory lister with CSV output, three detail levels, type filtering and live progress	docs/p3m-ls.md
p3m-ch	Parallel chmod + chown + chgrp in a single scan; separate dir/file modes, octal or symbolic, dry-run by default	docs/p3m-ch.md
p3m-rm	Parallel recursive remove with glob masks, dry-run by default, non-overridable root guard, never follows symlinks	docs/p3m-rm.md
p3m-du	Parallel disk usage with GNU du-compatible options (-s -c -d -h --si -X -B -b), hard-link dedup, never follows symlinks	docs/p3m-du.md
p3m-cp	Parallel copy (recursive like cp -R), dry-run by default, skips existing destinations unless --overwrite, -p metadata preservation, never follows symlinks	docs/p3m-cp.md
p3m-mv	Parallel move: single-rename fast path, parallel cross-device copy+delete, merges into existing trees (mv refuses), dry-run by default, hard root guard	docs/p3m-mv.md
p3m-find	Parallel find: classic expression grammar (! ( ) -a -o), common tests (-name -type -size -mtime -perm -user -empty -regex …), lazy stat, -print0; deliberately no -delete/-exec	docs/p3m-find.md
p3m-diff	Parallel directory comparison: names, types, sizes and metadata by default, byte-exact content verification with -c (size checked first — content read skipped when sizes differ), diff-like exit codes and a plain-language verdict	docs/p3m-diff.md

Building

make            # builds all tools into ./bin
make clean      # removes build artifacts

Requirements: GCC (or Clang), GNU Make, glibc with POSIX threads. No external library dependencies.

Documentation

Per-tool user documentation lives in docs/.

Testing

The project expects a testfolder/ directory (git-ignored) containing generated test data: directories of files of known size used to benchmark and validate the tools against their single-threaded coreutils equivalents.

Licence

MIT — see LICENSE.md.