How to recursively change the owner and group on a directory with Chef?

Question

the resource_directory has only 2 actions available: create and delete

I need to update the owner and group of a directory recursi

Answer 1

If this as a one-off to fix permissions your shortest path might be just knife ssh. (I just did that after ending up here on my own search.)

knife ssh 'name:*' "sudo chown -R $user:$group /full/path/to/directory"

knife ssh 'name:*' "sudo chmod -R 770 /full/path/to/directory"

If I were setting this up from scratch I think I'd need to set up the directory path and proper permissions with one line (NOTE: explicitly apply the perms to each parent in the path)

%w[ /foo /foo/bar /foo/bar/baz ].each do |path|
  directory path do
    owner 'root'
    group 'root'
    mode '0755'
  end

and then create each individual file as a cookbook_file.