Are *.la files supposed to be executable?

[Jeffrey Walton]

Hi Everyone,

I'm auditing $prefix for ownership and permissions. I noticed *.la
files are executable:

$ ls -Al /usr/local/lib/libgettextlib.la
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1078 Jan  8 15:58 /usr/local/lib/libgettextlib.la

And:

$ file -bi /usr/local/lib/libgettextlib.la
text/plain; charset=us-ascii

And:

$ cat /usr/local/lib/libgettextlib.la
# libgettextlib.la - a libtool library file
# Generated by libtool (GNU libtool) 2.4.6
#
# Please DO NOT delete this file!
# It is necessary for linking the library.

# The name that we can dlopen(3).
dlname='libgettextlib-0.21.so'

# Names of this library.
library_names='libgettextlib-0.21.so libgettextlib-0.21.so libgettextlib.so'
...

I don't believe the runtime linker maps these files as executable. If
they did, it would be something simple like a linker script:

    $ cat /usr/local/lib/libcurses.so
    INPUT(-lncursesw)

Are the *.la files supposed to be executable?

Jeff