How to reset Home Dir permissions?

Question

I've had a few situations lately where I've had to either move files from one user's Home Dir to another's, or delete a user then move its files back after recreating it, or simply fix wonky privs, but I can't seem to find an easy way to do these things.
Is there any way to automate the inheritance of privs? Like, I want to be able to drop a file into a user's home, and have it become owned by that user. I thought I'd at least be able to reset the owner while logged in as that user, by changing the setting in the Get Info window, but you aren't even given the option to authenticate as an admin...
Am I missing something easy here?

Answer 1

In short, there is no easy way to enable propagation of ownership to files that are dropped into a home folder.
However, I use a bash script on or home folder servers to create/fix permissions on a user's apple home folder. The script will go through all folders in the user's home folder and reset the permissions and ownership to the correct values.
1. Copy the script below into a file (eg. fixpermissions.sh) using emacs, nano or your favorite editor.
2. Open a terminal on the machine hosting the home folder.
3. Change to the top level of your home folder tree.
Eg. If the home folder is /Users/jweston, change to the /Users folder <pre>cd /Users</pre>
4. Run the fixpermissions.sh script with the username to fix.
<pre>./fixpermissions.sh jweston</pre>
5. Done! Note: If the folder does not exist it will be created. Otherwise, the script will fix permissions on the current contents.
Here is the script...
<pre>
#!/bin/bash
if [ -d ${1} ]
then
#Home Dir exists, reset permissions
chown -R ${1}.admin ${1}
chmod -R u=rwX,go= ${1}
chmod -R go=rX ${1}/Public ${1}/Sites
chmod go=wX ${1}/Public/Drop\ Box
chmod go=rX ${1}
else
#Home Dir does not exist, create...
mkdir ${1}
mkdir ${1}/Desktop
mkdir ${1}/Documents
mkdir ${1}/Library
mkdir ${1}/Movies
mkdir ${1}/Music
mkdir ${1}/Pictures
mkdir ${1}/Public
mkdir ${1}/Public/Drop\ Box
mkdir ${1}/Sites
chown -R ${1}.admin ${1}
chmod -R u=rwX,go= ${1}
chmod -R go=rX ${1}/Public ${1}/Sites
chmod go=wX ${1}/Public/Drop\ Box
chmod go=rX ${1}
fi</pre>