Chmod ACL removal

Question

Hey all,
A simple question...
For the life of me, I haven't figured out to do one easy command:
chmod -a "user allow attribute1, attribute2, etc.." file
That seems to take off the ACL entires for the user on that file.
Now, lets say I've got a folder with hundreds of sub directories and files with 50 users ACL'd all over the place inside.
How do I do something like: chmod -R -a "*" main_directory
in one command instead of going through all day one by one or in sets of users?
Much appriciated to anyone who can help me out!

Answer 1

Basically, we have a custom piece of software we developed that has an SQL database of "libraries" which are a collection of various media files.
Each of the libraries is stored on an xserve raid and the file structure looks something like:
Libraries
Libraries/library1
Libraries/library2
Libraries/library3
Libraries/libraryetc....
and there's a unix account for each library for a organization that can log in and only access their stuff. So as a result, we have all the unix users have read access into Libraries and then have individual read write for their own specific library folder. The second we used ACL to give the inherited permission, everyone started gaining access to each other's folders.
Now obviously, I'd usually just do that via unix permission, however qtss user needed to be the owner with rwx and www needed r_x permission, and other permission needed to be nothing, so ACL was necessary. And we couldn't switch around to have qtss and www under ACL cause Quicktime Streaming Server hates it
Plus this is all done from a web interface which passes the command to do all this to a cronjob that root is always looking for.