Ubuntu – How to change permissions of a folder, including its enclosed files and subdirectories

Each samba user must have a normal linux account as well.

1. Make sure that every user can access the common media folder on the unix side (without samba); alternatively, you can set force user in smb.conf
2. Make sure each user has a samba password set. You can set it with sudo smbpasswd -a your_user
3. Look at /etc/samba/smb.conf: check if the line security = user is set in the [GLOBAL] section
4. Set your shares in /etc/samba/smb.conf, see example

Example shares:

[allaccess]
    path = /media/common
    read only = no
    writeable = yes
    browseable = yes
    valid users = one, two, three, four
    create mask = 0644
    directory mask = 0755
    ; if you set this, all files get written as this user
    force user = one

This will be accessible via \\yourserver\allaccess

A single user share:

[special]
    path = /home/two/onlytwo
    read only = no
    writeable = yes
    browseable = yes
    valid users = one
    create mask = 0640
    directory mask = 0750

Restart the samba server after the changes with:

sudo service smbd restart

I'm not aware of any way you can do this in nautilus but you can do it from a command line

For example I have the following files in a directory

$ ls -la
total 400
drwxrwxr-x  2 warren warren   4096 Jun 22 17:49 .
drwxr-xr-x 74 warren warren  20480 Sep 21 13:05 ..
-rwxrwxr-x  1 root   root      199 Jun 22 18:02 ex1.py
-rwxrwxr-x  1 root   root       43 Jun 22 17:45 hello.py
-rw-rw-r--  1 root   root    27792 May 27 15:18 img.txt
-rw-rw-r--  1 root   root   323944 May 27 15:16 img.xcf
-rwxrwxr-x  1 root   root     3178 Jun  7 22:11 snake.py
-rw-rw-r--  1 root   root     3182 Jun  4 20:20 snake.py~
-rwxrwxr-x  1 root   root     7242 May 27 09:26 test
-rw-rw-r--  1 root   root      821 May 27 09:25 test.c

You can change all these to be owned by the user warren with:

sudo chown -R warren:warren *

As shown

warren@dell:~/test$ sudo chown warren:warren *
warren@dell:~/test$ ls -la
total 400
drwxrwxr-x  2 warren warren   4096 Jun 22 17:49 .
drwxr-xr-x 74 warren warren  20480 Sep 21 13:05 ..
-rwxrwxr-x  1 warren warren    199 Jun 22 18:02 ex1.py
-rwxrwxr-x  1 warren warren     43 Jun 22 17:45 hello.py
-rw-rw-r--  1 warren warren  27792 May 27 15:18 img.txt
-rw-rw-r--  1 warren warren 323944 May 27 15:16 img.xcf
-rwxrwxr-x  1 warren warren   3178 Jun  7 22:11 snake.py
-rw-rw-r--  1 warren warren   3182 Jun  4 20:20 snake.py~
-rwxrwxr-x  1 warren warren   7242 May 27 09:26 test
-rw-rw-r--  1 warren warren    821 May 27 09:25 test.c

the -R option means recursive; i.e. including sub-directories for more information enter man chown in a terminal.