Question

I’m looking for a way to check if a file is executable with Java 1.5.

I found SecurityManager.checkExec but I don’t think it helps…

I’m currently on Linux, but this needs to work for Windows also.

Any help would be appreciated, Thanks.

Answer 1

SecurityManager.checkExec actually checks something else, it checks whether your JVM has sufficent permissions to launch an executable.

You want java.nio.file.Files.isExecutable(...) to see if the file is considered “executable”.

It is available only in Java 1.7. For 1.5 and later, you would typically construct a ProcessBuilder class and and capture exceptions on failure to execute the file. For prior to 1.5, you would use the Runtime.exec(...) and capture the exception to determine that the file wasn’t executable.