I have multiple images stored in a set of organized folders. I need to re-size those images to a specific percentage recursively from their parent directory. I am running Ubuntu 11.10 and i prefer learning how to do that directly from the terminal.

You could use imagemagick. For instance, for resizing all the JPG images under the current directory to 50% of their original size, you could do:

for f in `find . -name "*.jpg"`
do
    convert $f -resize 50% $f.resized.jpg
done

The resulting files will have ".jpg" twice in their names. If that is an issue, you can check the following alternatives.

For traversing/finding the files to resize, you can use xargs too. Example:

find . -name "*.jpg" | xargs convert -resize 50%

This will create copies of the images. If you just want to convert them in place, you can use:

find . -name "*.jpg" | xargs mogrify -resize 50%