How can I execute a file without giving myself execute permissions (with chmod u+x
) for it?
If I try and tick the 'Allow executing file as program' checkmark, the checkmark is immediately removed.
How can I execute a file without giving myself execute permissions (with chmod u+x
) for it?
If I try and tick the 'Allow executing file as program' checkmark, the checkmark is immediately removed.
Please do this before anything further (unless you are sure you own the file).
Check and make sure that you own the file which you are trying to execute with one of the following methods.
Execute this command in a terminal
[ ! -O "/path/to/file" ] && echo "You don't own the file"
If it prints "You don't own the file
", see "Change file ownership" below.
Execute this command in a terminal
sudo chown $USER:$(id -gn $USER) "/path/to/file"
An answer I found from a comment by Lekensteyn on an answer for a question about chmod
on NTFS partitions which I think deserves it's own question and answer, full credit to Lekensteyn.
Use this command for executable files (substituting /path/to/executable
with the correct path):
64 bit executable files:
/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 /path/to/executable
32 bit executable files:
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 /path/to/executable
If the above doesn't work (or raises file not found errors), try using this before the above command
cd "$(dirname /path/to/executable)"
All the above commands will not work for text based scripts (Bash, Python, Perl, etc.), see below.
Use this command to find out if a executable is 32 (x86
) or 64 (x86-64
) bit
objdump -f "$file" | grep '^architecture' | cut -d, -f1 | sed 's/architecture: //'
If it says i386:x86-64
, then it's 64 bit. If it says i386
only, then it's 32 bit.
For text based scripts (Bash, Python, Perl, etc.), you should use the command specified in the first #!
line in the file.
For example, if the first line of the file is
#!/usr/bin/env python3
then run these commands in a terminal (substituting /path/to/file
with the correct path)
cd "$(dirname /path/to/file)" # Not strictly necessary, see section below
# Replace '/usr/bin/env python3' with the first line without the front #!
/usr/bin/env python3 /path/to/file # Use './file' if you want
.jar
filesFor Java executable jar's, you can simply use these commands (substituting /path/to/jar
with the correct path):
cd "$(dirname /path/to/jar)" # Not strictly necessary, see section below
java -jar /path/to/jar
cd "$(dirname /path/to/file)"
These are possible circumstances where you wont need to use cd "$(dirname /path/to/file)"
before running the program with any method: If at least one is true, you wont need cd
first.
apt-get
)cd
(or equivalent) to change to an absolute path before doing any file operations (example: cd "$(dirname "$0")"
)./
or starting with no slash)If unsure, add cd "$(dirname "$0")"
(or equivalent) to the top of the script (if applicable) or use cd "$(dirname /path/to/file)"
anyway.