Recovering file attributes from snapshot

[Michael ODonnell]

I'm in a situation where the ownerships/permissions in a
particular filesystem hierachy get changed by circumstances
beyond my control (*cough*Perforce*cough*) and I need to
force them back before I can use that hierachy.  I'm prepared
to script a solution if necessary but I hate reinventing the
wheel so I wonder if this tool already exists.  It'd basically
allow me to snapshot the desired attributes (ie. just certain
metadata items, not the contents) of an arbitrary set of
files/directories/symlinks/etc and then later allow me to
restablish those metadata by referring to the snapshot, but
leaving the data unchanged.