I’ll admit it: I rarely ever work with Access Control Lists. Most of my time is spent in web server land where POSIX permissions are more than adequate, so I just fire up Server Admin if I have to add an ACL.

However, a co-worker recently ran into an ACL mess after a client converted their server from Standalone to Open Directory Master and back again. So, how to strip all ACLs so you can start over? It’s probably dangerous or some command I’m not familiar with, right? Nope.

The following call to chmod will recursively remove all ACLs:

chmod -RN /path/to/directory

Voilà!