Background:
Our company uses Dropbox for Business (DB4B) for file sharing and there are company-wide folders that are shared read-only to groups of users that contain documents and other files they need to copy locally and edit (like template PDFs and such). Sometimes there are folders of items that are copied out, modified, and then zipped up and sent to customers.
DB4B seems to have a limitation on any read-only folders for users: when you copy files or folders out of these and onto your local machine they are flagged as "Locked" in the file/folder metadata, and you can see a lock icon on them in the Finder. If you Get Info on these files/folders, you can uncheck "Locked" to unlock them.
The problem is that macOS does not offer a recursive unlock in the UI. You literally have to Get Info on every file and folder, and individually unlock it. In this case it could be one file, or 100 files in nested folders.
If you don't unlock the entire tree you cannot zip it, and if you don't unlock files you can't edit them. It's not a permissions issue as the users have read/write permissions but seemingly Dropbox is using the "Locked" flag on read-only folders and it's carrying over when you copy out of Dropbox.
I've contacted Dropbox support which offered that we should either give users write access to those folders (which, for obvious reasons, is a bad idea) or we should only be "sharing files" via share links. This doesn't really fit the Dropbox for Business model of centralized files and shares for users.
My question:
Is there a user-friendly way of recursively unlocking a tree of files/folders on macOS? I am familiar with the command-line Terminal way of doing it, but it's hard to tell Bob from Accounting to drop into Terminal every time he'd like to unlock these folders.
Alternatively:
Is there a way to stop Dropbox for Business from behaving this way while maintaining the read-only folder permissions for users?
