Linux Mint 11 is the greatest operating system ever made.

[Jeff250]

It looks like my Ubuntu machine does this too for removable media.

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$ mount
. . .
/dev/sdc1 on /media/Transcend type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks,uid=1000,gid=1000,shortname=mixed,dmask=0077,utf8=1,showexec,flush)

It looks like showexec is the mount option in question.

showexec
If set, the execute permission bits of the file will be allowed only if the extension part of the name is .EXE, .COM, or .BAT. Not set by default.

It seems a bit funky:

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$ touch foo.exe
$ ls -l foo.exe 
-rwxr-xr-x 1 jeffrey jeffrey 0 2011-12-09 14:58 foo.exe

But:

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$ touch bar
$ ls -l bar
-rw-r--r-- 1 jeffrey jeffrey 0 2011-12-09 14:59 bar
$ mv bar bar.exe
$ ls -l bar.exe 
-rw-r--r-- 1 jeffrey jeffrey 0 2011-12-09 14:59 bar.exe
$ chmod a+x bar.exe
$ ls -l bar.exe
-rw-r--r-- 1 jeffrey jeffrey 0 2011-12-09 14:59 bar.exe

Note that normally, without showexec, everything is executable since FAT32 doesn't support this permission. Here is my permanent FreeDOS partition:

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$ ls -l /dos
total 348
-rwxrwx---  1 root plugdev    711 2009-05-27 22:27 autoexec.bat
-rwxrwx---  1 root plugdev  66945 2006-08-28 22:40 COMMAND.COM
-rwxrwx---  1 root plugdev    826 2009-07-17 19:42 fdconfig.sys
drwxrwx--- 10 root plugdev   4096 2009-07-17 19:25 fdos
-r-xr-x---  1 root plugdev 125960 2003-07-01 13:30 IO.SYS
-rwxrwx---  1 root plugdev  45341 2006-08-18 05:58 KERNEL.SYS
-r-xr-x---  1 root plugdev      6 2009-07-21 08:40 MSDOS.SYS
-rwxrwx---  1 root plugdev  11459 2006-08-11 13:55 SYS.COM

[snoopy]

In a sense, I'd rather that everything be mounted without execute permissions.

The issue is resolved if the stick is ext formatted, correct? If you're using the stick exclusively as a carrier for portable linux apps, why not format it ext3?

[Jeff250]

The issue is resolved if the stick is ext formatted, correct?

I would imagine. If you have to keep it FAT32 for some reason, if you can stand the stink, you could probably just give any linux applications a *.exe extension.

[snoopy]

The issue is resolved if the stick is ext formatted, correct?

I would imagine. If you have to keep it FAT32 for some reason, if you can stand the stink, you could probably just give any linux applications a *.exe extension.

Indeed, assuming my system is configured to mount the sticks in the fashion, which I doubt. It does seem kinda silly to me to do it that way. Why would you flag *.exe files as executable when most of them would be windows binaries and won't run directly in linux anyways?

The only time I've tried to run something off a stick, it was a script which was just as easily put into ~/bin/.