Subject: bug#10735: chmod +x file

From: Bob Proulx <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2012 10:24:04 -0700

Pádraig Brady wrote:
> [email-masked] wrote:
> > ubuntu@ubuntu-VirtualBox:~/.gvfs/account on stockholm/Documents/03 professional/structured_documentation$ chmod +x doc/filters_for_this_document 
> > chmod: changing permissions of `doc/filters_for_this_document': Operation not supported 
> 
> That's a file system presented by gvfs-fuse-daemon,
> and it's telling you it doesn't support that operation.
> I'm closing this as a chmod issue so.

To provide a little more explanation let me add for Francky that fuse
filesystems are hacks to make something appear as a filesystem.  They
mostly work okay.  But they often do not implement everything that is
needed by a real filesystem.  I am only familiar with sshfs fuse
filesystem and it is missing a number of important interfaces, but can
read and write files okay so I still use it in spite of deficiencies.

Since chmod is detecting an error then it must report it.

Since I see VirtualBox in the hostname I can imagine this is either an
MS or Mac machine running VirtualBox with an installation of Ubuntu
and with a fuse map back to an underlying FAT or NTFS filesystem and
the underlying filesystem does not support Unix file mode bits.  But
that doesn't really matter.  The point is that the entire chain must
support the operation or there will be an error.  The chmod command
is just the messenger reporting this to you. 

If you access those files through a "real" Unix-like filesystem then
you won't get that error.

Bob