I realise that TMTOWTDI, but I don't really understand what you are gaining over the standard UNIX chown/chgrp/chmod commands, as these are recursive anyway (with the -R option)?

I'm not by any means being anti-Perl here, but if there's a perfectly good system command then why not use it? Even if you want all the operations to be completed in one go, a four line shell (or Perl) script would suffice.

And if the system commands are not available, just install PPT.

JJ