Restore Item-Level permission inheritance by Bulk

Question

We have an Document Library (a) with folders (b), subfolders (c) and subsubfolders (d) with documents (e) in it. All with a unique permissions set (a huge pita, came from a LiveLink env which was migrated to SharePoint).

Is there a way to restore permission inheritance for a part of this tree at once? For example I want unique permissions in C and have D and E inherit those. Or do i have to manualy re-enable permission inheritance for each item one at the time?

(Or a method to remove all unique permissions in a DocLib, which would mean I only have to re-create the permissions in the few top level folders)

Answer 1

No. You will need to re-enable permissions inheritance for each item separately. Some simple PowerShell script can be developed to handle this. However simplicity and speed depends on your exact requirements, tree complexity and of course items count.

PowerShell example (restore all items in targeted library)

$webUrl = "http://mycoolsite"
$web = Get-SPWeb $webUrl
$list = $web.Lists["mycoollib"]

#Using foreach is time consuming
#caml query can be used to fetch only specific items and/or folders
foreach ($item in $list.items) {
    $item.ResetRoleInheritance()
}

Answer 2

You can write something in code, or PowerShell, to loop through and reset the permissions. I don't think there is something like Windows has that will force changes to the children items.