Recursive chmod fails I have a folder owned by root:admin. I would like to change permissions of all files inside, so I can edit them without sudo, but recursive chmod fails:  

$ sudo chmod -R u+w some-folder/


does nothing. Any ideas how to fix it?

At the same time changing permission to a single file works seamlessly.

Story:

I installed a Python package from GitHub repository via pip, as an editable install. I am contributing some changes to it, but doing sudo for every edit and every git command is not convenient (I guess - neither safe).

EDIT:

$ sudo chmod -v -R u+w some-folder/


returns nothing.

Path is below:

/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/
The issue is that to be able to write to a file you need to be the owner for u permissions or be part of the group for g.

Note as a user you are not root so if owned by root the u permission does not matter. As you are using sudo I assume you are in the admin group (this is not necessarily the case but if anyone  alters this I would expect they fully understand these permissions). These files are owned by admin so the permission that matters is the g one.

Thus the chomd you need is

sudo chmod -v -R g+w some-folder/


There are alternatives


As this is where python is installed you should be using pip, easy_install and setuptools to do these updates which will require sudo. Another way is to use virtualenv and so install will be done to your own directories  
You can change the owner
sudo chown -R user some-folder/