Sudo prevent switches/arguments on command

sudo introduces inherent security risks and it is generally ill advised to give to users that don't have high levels of trust.

Why not limit simply to recursive chown for the parent directory?

sudoers primarily uses globbing. According to the manpage, it doesn't match / on wildcards. More details in the manpage.

As far as a more advanced solution, a script should do the trick.

[root@server wmoore]# egrep '^wmoore' /etc/sudoers
wmoore ALL= NOPASSWD: /bin/chown -[RPfchv] wmoore\:wmoore /home/wmoore/[a-zA-Z0-9]*

[wmoore@server ~]$ sudo -l
User wmoore may run the following commands on this host:
    (root) NOPASSWD: /bin/chown -[RPfchv] wmoore:wmoore /home/wmoore/[a-zA-Z0-9]*

[wmoore@server ~]$ sudo chown -R wmoore:wmoore /home/wmoore/../../tmp/test
Sorry, user wmoore is not allowed to execute '/bin/chown -R wmoore:wmoore /home/wmoore/../../tmp/test' as root on server.

Oh, right. sudo package:

Name        : sudo                         Relocations: (not relocatable)
Version     : 1.6.9p17                          Vendor: CentOS
Release     : 3.el5_3.1                     Build Date: Tue 24 Mar 2009 07:55:42 PM EDT

CentOS5.

You can definitely embed the $cwd in sudoers, to allow someone only to remove a file under a particular directory, but you're going the wrong way about it. The way to do what you want is to use absolute paths in sudoers, eg

orc       ALL=(ALL) /bin/rm /tmp/someuseless.bin