Fixing permissions?

At one time I copied a bunch of files from my son's computer to my wife's computer and into her home directory. Ever since then I have had permissions errors when trying to do backups from her machine across the network to my machine where I keep a backup copy of her home directory.

I have gone through by hand and thought I had found and fixed all the problem files but the problem persists.

I have run Disk Utility Fix Permissions repeatedly on my wife's machine to try to fix this but the problem continues.

Apparently there continue to be a few files with the wrong owner permissions scattered among her home subdirectories.

We are running Panther MacOSX 10.3.9.

Ideas on how to fix this? Is there a utility or a terminal command that I can use to fix this?

 

*sigh* Wish it was only that. No, this is in the home folder. Lots of data files.

 

Unfortunately the "apply to enclosed items" does not seem to always do its job. I have hesitated to do a massive application of chown/chmod because I fear there may be things I should not be changing and I'll end up with more of a mess than now. What I may end up doing is backing up, doing it on a backup and seeing if that solves the problem and then doing it on the original. I was hoping there might be some handy utility for this that would do it and not mess things up.

 

sudo chown -R user:user /Users/user

appears to have done the trick on fixing the owners.
I was still getting errors with my backup program.
Deleting the original backup and doing a fresh copy seems to have helped that.

Thanks for the suggestions.