Creating executable files in Linux

Question

One thing I plan to be doing is writing (painfully simple) Perl scripts, and I'd like to be able to run them without explicitly calling Perl from the terminal. I appreciate that, to do this, I need to grant them execute permissions. Doing this with chmod is easy enough, but it also seems like a slightly laborious extra step. What I would like is one of two things:

Firstly, is there a way to set the execute flag when saving a file? Currently I'm experimenting with gedit and geany, but would be willing to switch to a similarly- (or better-) featured editor if it had this capability.

Failing that, is there a way to declare that all files created in a particular directory should have execute permissions?

My umask is set to 022, which should be OK, as far as I understand, but it would appear that the files are created as text files (with 666 default permissions) rather than executable files (with 777 default permissions).

Perhaps I'm just being lazy, but I figure there must be a more convenient way than chmodding every single script one creates.

Answer 1

Make file executable:

chmod +x file

Find location of perl:

which perl

This should return something like

/bin/perl sometimes /usr/local/bin

Then in the first line of your script add:

#!"path"/perl with path from above e.g.

#!/bin/perl

Then you can execute the file

./file

There may be some issues with the PATH, so you may want to change that as well ...