Updating and committing only a file's permissions using git version control

Question

Just turned an some.sh file into an executable (chmod 755 ...), the permissions were updated but not the content. Is there a way to commit

Answer 1

By default, git will update execute file permissions if you change them. It will not change or track any other permissions.

If you don't see any changes when modifying execute permission, you probably have a configuration in git which ignore file mode.

Look into your project, in the .git folder for the config file and you should see something like this:

[core]
    filemode = false

You can either change it to true in your favorite text editor, or run:

git config core.filemode true

Then, you should be able to commit normally your files. It will only commit the permission changes.

Answer 2

Not working for me.

The mode is true, the file perms have been changed, but git says there's no work to do.

git init
git add dir/file
chmod 440 dir/file
git commit -a

The problem seems to be that git recognizes only certain permission changes.

Answer 3

@fooMonster article worked for me

# git ls-tree HEAD
100644 blob 55c0287d4ef21f15b97eb1f107451b88b479bffe    script.sh

As you can see the file has 644 permission (ignoring the 100). We would like to change it to 755:

# git update-index --chmod=+x script.sh

commit the changes

# git commit -m "Changing file permissions"
[master 77b171e] Changing file permissions
0 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
mode change 100644 => 100755 script.sh