Administrating NTFS permissions and ownership is a simple matter in Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 when you're operating on a single item at a time, or when you have simple structures inheriting permissions from one or two folders. However, when you have a huge mess of countless folders, and the permissions vary widely among all the trees and sub-trees and even the files, it's not too fun to use the GUI. Not excited about individually editing thousands of files and folders? Neither am I. That's why I put together this collection of information on the subject.

This collection of notes covers the tools and techniques for handling such issues on NTFS partitions. Problems like this are easily handled in Unix/Linux with the tools of chmod and chown, but the equivalence in Windows are not included with most OS distributions (Windows Server 2003 having the takeown.exe command is the only exception, and it only assigns ownership). There are tools from Microsoft and elsewhere to manage NTFS permissions, but they are often unwieldy, and virtually always buggy. It turns out there are lots of options for setting ownership that all work fairly effectively and reliably. But when it comes to managing permissions on folders and files en masse, I spent a couple days of painful trial and error with each of the many tools documented here to finally discover only a single revision of a single tool (SubInACL.exe version 5.2.3790.1180) that would actually do the job without corrupting the ACL entries or having unpredictable results.