[tex-live] "chmod" flags for windows executables

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Sat Nov 10 19:48:04 CET 2007


Mojca Miklavec writes:
 > I would like to suggest applying the "executable" flag on windows
 > binaries in TeX Live, even though that's usually not a problem since
 > windows usually doesn't follow those flags (but there might be some
 > crazy users out there misusing binaries form TeX Live for other
 > purposes).

Hi Mojca, 
did you install from the CD or DVD?  I don't know whether the TL
installer for Windows changes permission flags after files are
installed.  If not, there is a difference: Files on the CD are zip
files currently, and file permissions are set on a UNIX system before
the zip files are created.  Windows has another concept of file
permissions than UNIX, maybe the Windows version of unzip is aware of
these differences.  Files on the DVD are uncompressed and copied to
the hard drive, maybe with Windows commands like copy or xcopy.
The resulting permission flags can be different.

I installed TL-2007 from the CD on my Windows machine at work and when
I run (under Cygwin) the command

     ls -l /cygdrive/c/texlive/2007/bin/win32

I get -rwx------ for all files in this directory.

BTW, it's probably not Windows which ignores file permissions, but the
explorer.  For executable files the permission flags are probably not
important because whether a file is executable is determined by the
value of the environtment variable %PATHEXT%.  When I run

  start "" foo.pdf

on the command line I get an "acces denied" message if the the
executable flag is not set but the explorer doesn't care.

Which program did you use in order to find out which permission flags
are set?

Regards,
  Reinhard

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