How To Mark a File as Executable in a Git Repo

When dealing with Git repositories, you may run into situations where you need to mark a file as executable. The good news is that Git offers a way to set execution permissions on files in a repo, even on Windows. This is critical to allow anyone pulling the repo to run executable files that come from it without having to manually give them the right permissions.

In this article, you will learn how to give a file in a Git repository 0755 permission to make it executable.

--chmod=+x and --chmod=-x Git Options

Before seeing how to achieve the desired result, let's take a look at the two Git options you can use to set executable permissions on a file. These are:

• --chmod=+x: Adds executable permissions to a file in the repo. The plus sign (+) specifies that the executable permission will be added.

• --chmod=-x: Removes executable permissions from a file. The minus sign (-) specifies that the executable permission will be removed.

Note that you can use these two options on popular git commands like git add and git update-index.

Let's now dig into how to use these options to mark a file in a git repo as executable!

Adding a File and Making it Executable in Git

Suppose your git repository contains a script.sh file and you want to give it executable permissions. Follow the steps below to add the file to the repo and mark it as executable with Git:

1. Add the file as executable to the repository with the command below:

git add --chmod=+x script.sh

2. Commit the changes to the repository with:

git commit -m "<your_commit_message>"

Congrats! script.sh now has 0755 permissions. Keep in mind that you can also remove the executable permission from a file. To do so, simply replace +x with -x in the git add command in step 1. Note that with this approach, you can make a file executable for Linux and macOS from Windows.

That's it! It only took two commands and a handful of seconds!

Conclusion

In this article, you learned that marking a file as executable in a Git repository is a straightforward process. In detail, you can use the chmod=+x and chmod=-x options to add or remove executable permissions on a file in git, respectively. By following this step-by-step tutorial, you learned how to give 0755 permissions to a file in your Git repository. This procedure works identically on Linux, Windows, and macOS.

Thanks for reading! I hope you found this article helpful.

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