Check if a file is executable

Question

I am wondering what\'s the easiest way to check if a program is executable with bash, without executing it ? It should at least check whether the file has execute rights, a

Answer 1

To test whether a file itself has ACL_EXECUTE bit set in any of permission sets (user, group, others) regardless of where it resides, i. e. even on a tmpfs with noexec option, use stat -c '%A' to get the permission string and then check if it contains at least a single “x” letter:

if [[ "$(stat -c '%A' 'my_exec_file')" == *'x'* ]] ; then
    echo 'Has executable permission for someone'
fi

The right-hand part of comparison may be modified to fit more specific cases, such as *x*x*x* to check whether all kinds of users should be able to execute the file when it is placed on a volume mounted with exec option.