Some Windows and Mac users will be surprised at this, some will laugh – and well they should. On Linux it’s not possible to just download a program and run it, not even if it’s a program for the right platform. How stupid is that?<\/p>\n
The problem is that (probably for no-longer-relevant security reasons) any file you download using a web browser (over HTTP or FTP) will have read and write permissions for the user, and read (or nothing) for group and others – in other words -rw-r–r–, or 644. A double-click on the file in a file manager (or on the desktop) will get the system to think that it’s a data file that needs to be opened in another program, and usually a dialog will come up asking you what program you want to open this file (program) in. Arrrgh!<\/p>\n
I’m asking around for a solution, but I suspect there is none. If that’s the case maybe I’ll try to fix it myself – the solution is a couple of lines in C.<\/p>\n
Some background: it is possible to have a shell script (let’s call it program.sh) that has more than just shell commands. For example the Loki games installer is a shell script but it has a GUI and a few hundred binary files (possibly in an archive), all this in program.sh. There are other examples of this.<\/p>\n
So let’s say we make a new file extension – .esh, for executable .sh, and these will actually be shell scripts, following all the rules of sh\/bash. When one double-clicks on such a file in a file manager, the file manager will either:<\/p>\n
The program will be something like this: So if the file manager runs ‘esh program.esh’ it will just execute \/bin\/bash program.esh, which is exactly what I want – it will give the illusion of a file being executed even if it doesn’t have execute permissions.<\/p>\n Of course then there is the matter of getting distributions to ship with esh installed by default – but maybe I’m not the only one who thinks this is a major misfeature in Linux, and it will get done quickly.<\/p>\n If I don’t find a different solution in a couple of weeks, I will probably go ahead and start pimping this one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some Windows and Mac users will be surprised at this, some will laugh – and well they should. On Linux it’s not possible to just download a program and run it, not even if it’s a program for the right platform. How stupid is that? The problem is that (probably for no-longer-relevant security reasons) any … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-andrew","4":"post-11","6":"format-standard","7":"category-opensource","8":"category-safeforseneca"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":687,"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions\/687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n
\n\/* esh.c *\/
\nint main(int argc,char** argv)
\n{
\nif(argc != 2) return -1;
\nexec(\"\/bin\/bash\", \"bash\", argv[1], NULL);
\n}
\n\/* thank you WordPress for deleting spaces at the beginning of a line. grrr *\/
\n<\/code><\/p>\n