How to ship files as executable? (no git)

Question

I see there is a question similar to this but that answer relates to Git, which I am not using here.

I often make small scripts that I send to others with very limited command-line skills to run. Is there a way to package my script so that users don't need to change permissions for my executable? I tried to package my script such that the first executable script changes the permissions for all the others, but at this point I have been unable to find a way to ship that first script in a way such that the user does not have to give it execute permission i.e. chmod +x First_script

Am I running into this wall because there is no solution?

Answer 1

A simple way is to make a tarball, a compressed tar archive. It you create it with root privileges and the user extracts the content also with root access, the permissions should be preserved.

Examples

sudo -cvzf filename.tar.gz directory  # create a compressed tar archive of the directory and its content

cd /to-where-you-want-it-extracted
sudo -xvzf filename.tar.gz            # extract the content from the archive

There are details in man tar and you find good tutorials about tar via the internet.

Answer 2

You can wrap your script (that has executable rights at this point) into the package format for the OS in question.

Then your users can just install the package and the proper rights will automatically be there.

debreate is an easy solution for this very problem on debian-based OSes.

Answer 3

The shar command, see man shar, was invented to do just this type of thing.

From man shar, or https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/en/man1/shar.1.html

DESCRIPTION

   shar creates "shell archives" (or shar files) which are in text format and can be emailed.
   These  files  may be unpacked later by executing them with /bin/sh.  The resulting archive
   is sent to standard out unless the -o option is given.  A wide range of  features  provide
   extensive flexibility in manufacturing shars and in specifying shar "smartness".  Archives
   may be fairly simple (--vanilla-operation) or essentially a mailable tar archive.

and

EXAMPLES

   The first shows how to make a shell archive out of all C program sources.  The second
   produces a shell archive with all .c and .h files, which unpacks silently.  The third
   gives a shell archive of all uuencoded .arc files, into numbered files starting from
   arc.sh.01.  The last example gives a shell archive which will use only the file names at
   unpack time.

       shar *.c > cprog.shar
       shar -Q *.[ch] > cprog.shar
       shar -B -l28 -oarc.sh *.arc
       shar -f /lcl/src/u*.c > u.sh