Start Application Without the X Bit Set

When one plays in many environments, ocassionally you can expect issues. For me one of those issues was starting Linux application from a shared drive. For reasons I won’t get into now, except to say security-related, executable (aka X) bit was removed. Thus it wasn’t possible to start application.

But, as always in Linux, there are multiple ways to skin a cat. For me the method that did wonders was usage of ld-linux library. For example, to start a.out application, one could use the following command:

/usr/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 ./a.out

PS: This is for applications (e.g., files with ELF header). If you want to run a script without executable bit set, just call the interpreter directly, e.g.:

bash ./a.sh