On 10/19/05, Mike McMullin
On Tue, 2005-10-18 at 13:36 -0400, Ken Schneider wrote:
On Tue, 2005-10-18 at 13:02 -0400, Steve Jacobs wrote:
I've just begun downloading the JRE 1.5 RPM from Sun, in order to install it to my Suse 9.1 machine. While it's downloading, I started looking at the installation instructions.
One of the first steps is to add the "x" permission to the downloaded file. I'm still somewhat naive and ignorant in the ways of the penguin (and weak on security in general), so maybe this is an obvious question to most of you, but WHY wouldn't the file be executable from the get-go?
The x attribute signifies whether or not the file can be executed. You will have to ask the person that provided the file why.
I'm not an ace when it comes to RPM's, but having it executable makes no sense to me. If I understand the files in an RPM they have they attributes already assigned and are placed in the install systems normal directory structure with those same permissions. I can understand changing the permissions on any install scripts I download, as they don't come down marked as executable, but not an RPM.
That's perfectly right. In case of the JRE you're downloading a file called jre-xxx.rpm.bin which is a self-extracting archive you will have to invoke directly. It then displays the licensing information and extracts an RPM ready for installation via rpm -i. \Steve