How do I make git accept mode changes without accepting all text changes?

Question

I've got the opposite problem from "How do I make Git ignore file mode (chmod) changes?" I've got a file that I've changed executable permission on, but there are also some text changes, and I want to commit the former but not the latter. Is this possible with git?

(Actually, I've made some text changes I want to commit along with the executable permission change, and others I don't want to commit)

Update: Unstaging the text changes to the file, and then doing git add -p again and incorporating some of the text changes managed to get the mode change into staging. (My git version is 1.5.4.3)

Answer 1

You should be able to do:

git update-index --chmod=(+|-)x <file> 

to adjust the executable bit stored in the index.

You can then commit this separately from any changes to the files content.

Answer 2

git add -i will let you selectively add some hunks from a file to the index. I don't know whether or not it's sensitive to permissions, but if you were to add a hunk after the chmod operation, it might end up in the index correctly even without explicitly updating the permission.