Creating executable files in Linux

Question

One thing I plan to be doing is writing  painfully simple  Perl scripts  and I d like to be able to run them without explicitly calling Perl from the terminal  I appreciate that  to do this  I need to grant them execute permissions  Doing this with chmod is easy enough  but it also seems like a slightly laborious extra step  What I would like is one of two things   Firstly  is there a way to set the execute flag when saving a file  Currently I m experimenting with gedit and geany  but would be willing to switch to a similarly-  or better-  featured editor if it had this capability   Failing that  is there a way to declare that all files created in a particular directory should have execute permissions   My umask is set to 022  which should be OK  as far as I understand  but it would appear that the files are created as text files  with 666 default permissions  rather than executable files  with 777 default permissions    Perhaps I m just being lazy  but I figure there must be a more convenient way than chmodding every single script one creates

User · Answer

No need to hack your editor  or switch editors   Instead we can come up with a script to watch your development directories and chmod files as they re created  This is what I ve done in the attached bash script  You probably want to read through the comments and edit the  config  section as fits your needs  then I would suggest putting it in your  HOME bin  directory and adding its execution to your  HOME  login or similar file  Or you can just run it from the terminal   This script does require inotifywait  which comes in the inotify-tools package on Ubuntu   sudo apt-get install inotify-tools   Suggestions edits improvements are welcome      usr bin env bash    --- usage ---     Depends   inotifywait  available in inotify-tools on Ubuntu      Edit the  config  section below to reflect your working directory  WORK DIR    and your watched directories  WATCH DIR  Each directory in WATCH DIR will   be logged by inotify and this script will  chmod  x  any new files created   therein  If SUBDIRS is  TRUE  this script will watch WATCH DIRS recursively    I recommend adding this script to your  HOME  login or similar to have it   run whenever you log into a shell  eg  echo  watchdirs sh  amp    gt  gt     login     This script will only allow one instance of itself to run at a time     --- config ---    WORK DIR   HOME path to devel    top working directory  for cleanliness   WATCH DIRS          WORK DIR dirA        WORK DIR dirC                                    list of directories to watch SUBDIRS  TRUE                    watch subdirectories too NOTIFY ARGS  -e create -q        watch for create events  non-verbose     --- script starts here ---     probably don t need to edit beyond this point    kill all previous instances of myself SCRIPT  bash   basename  0   MATCHES  ps ax   egrep  SCRIPT   grep -v grep   awk   print  1     grep -v     kill  MATCHES  gt  amp   dev null    set recursive notifications  for subdirectories  if     SUBDIRS     TRUE      then     RECURSE  -r  else     RECURSE    fi  while true   do       grab an event     EVENT  inotifywait  RECURSE  NOTIFY ARGS  WATCH DIRS         parse the event into DIR  TAGS  FILE     OLDIFS  IFS   IFS       set --  EVENT     E DIR  1     E TAGS  2     E FILE  3     IFS  OLDIFS        skip if it s not a file event or already executable  unlikely      if     -f   E DIR E FILE         -x   E DIR E FILE      then         continue     fi        set file executable     chmod  x  E DIR E FILE done

User · Answer

It s really not that big of a deal  You could just make a script with the single command   chmod a x   pl   And run the script after creating a perl file  Alternatively  you could open a file with a command like this   touch filename pl  amp  amp  chmod a x filename pl  amp  amp  vi filename pl   choose your favorite editor

User · Answer

What you describe is the correct way to handle this    You said that you want to stay in the GUI  You can usually set the execute bit through the file properties menu  You could also learn how to create a custom action for the context menu to do this for you if you re so inclined  This depends on your desktop environment of course   If you use a more advanced editor  you can script the action to happen when the file is saved  For example  I m only really familiar with vim   you could add this to your  vimrc to make any new file that starts with       bin    executable   au BufWritePost   if getline 1             if getline 1       bin     silent  chmod  x  lt afile gt    endif   endif

User · Answer

Make file executable   chmod  x file  Find location of perl   which perl  This should return something like   bin perl sometimes  usr local bin  Then in the first line of your script add      quot path quot  perl with path from above e g     bin perl  Then you can execute the file    file  There may be some issues with the PATH  so you may want to change that as well

User · Answer

I think the problem you re running into is that  even though you can set your own umask values in the system  this does not allow you to explicitly control the default permissions set on a new file by gedit  or whatever editor you use    I believe this detail is hard-coded into gedit and most other editors  Your options for changing it are  a  hacking up your own mod of gedit or  b  finding a text editor that allows you to set a preference for default permissions on new files   Sorry  I know of none    In light of this  it s really not so bad to have to chmod your files  right

[linux] Creating executable files in Linux

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