Re: Use of chmod in gnulib

[Paul Eggert]

On 3/22/20 10:17 AM, Jeffrey Walton wrote:

> According to the Autoconf manual, commands like 'chmod +x' should be
> avoided in favor of 'chmod a+x'. I believe the same applies to 'chmod
> -w' and friends. Also see
> https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.69/html_node/Limitations-of-Usual-Tools.html.
>
> It looks like there are some of the earlier in the gnulib sources:

Those uses look safe to me. Either they're 'chmod +a' which is a macOS extension 
and so the Autoconf advice doesn't apply, or they're 'chmod +x' on a newly 
created file which is safe unless someone has a purposely-harmful and 
unsupported umask like 0777 which will break 'configure' in countless other ways.