chown or chmod was recursively ran on the wrong directory, is there a way to fix this?

Question

Chown or chmod was recursively run on my server against the wrong directory. Is there a way to quickly and easily fix this?  

Answer

The best way to handle this would be to restore the entire affected directory tree (or the entire system in the case of running on /) from an image, snapshot, or system backups. If you do not have an available backup, you will want to talk with your system administrator to assist you with migrating the old server to a new server. If you do not have user backups, please refer to the following for additional guidance on recovery from a crashed disk. Recovering from a crashed disk