Subject: bug#10735: chmod +x

From: Eric Blake <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:51:40 -0700

On 02/07/2012 02:30 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 02/07/2012 07:59 AM, [email-masked] wrote:
>> I was wondering wether I couldn't write something like
>>
>> if [not on NTFS filesystem] then
>>   chmod +x
> 
> No doubt you can write something like that.
> I don't use NTFS, so I'm not a good source of advice
> about the details.

And if you listen to the advice from autoconf, it would be better to do
things like:

probe whether chmod +x 2>/dev/null makes a difference on a dummy file
based on that probe, control whether to skip all other chmod +x

by rewriting things as a feature-based probe (does chmod +x work or spit
out noise), rather than a name-based probe (am I on NTFS), your script
will be more portable to other file systems that share NTFS
shortcomings, as well as automatically start using chmod +x if the
kernel folks later figure out a way to make NTFS fake chmod +x in a
reasonable manner.

-- 
Eric Blake   [email-masked]    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org