Recursively change ownership and permissions on a folder and its contents

[Jonathan King]

Hi,

We have a hierarchy of files/folders that have had the permissions 'messed up' and some of the documents contained within are owned by a variety of folks. I'd like to be able to set ownership to a specific user and bulk-change all the permissions to a set list. Can GAM do this? I learned about GAMADV-X today; can it do that? It seems that operating on a hierarchy just isn't built-in to G Suite, and I don't really want to write a whole set of batch commands to get a file list and then operate on it. Hoping I've just missed an available option somewhere.

Thanks for any direction all you helpful GAM users can give, this is rather urgent :)

-jonathan

[+KimNilsson]

Yes, GAMADV-X can do it (don't know if regular GAM can).

gam user EmailAddressOfNewOwner claim ownership FolderIDofTheTopFolder

I don't remember 100%, but perhaps the new owner needs to have access to TheTopFolder.

I usually add a pipe like this to my commanda, so I have a log of what happened.

| tee -a ~/GAM-activities/NewOwner-FolderID.txt

[Jonathan King]

Thanks so much for that tip. It seems that this will change Ownership, but not Permissions. I can change permissions on a hierarchy recursively using BetterCloud Enterprise, but that's rather spendy.

[Kim Nilsson]

You can most likely also remove all other users' access after the ownership transfer. I just don't know the syntax by heart. 

[Patrick McNeal]

It does appear the new owner needs access to TheTopFolder for this to work. Thanks for the tip - this has saved us lots of time.