preserving file permission when creating a tarball with Python's tarfile

Question

hello stackoverflowers,

I want to preserve the original file permissions when using Python's tarfile module. I have quite a few executable files that lose their permissions once the tarball is extracted.

I'm doing something like this:

import tarfile
tar = tarfile.open("mytarball.tar.gz", 'w:gz')
tar.add('my_folder') #tar the entire folder 
tar.close()

Then I copy it from windows to a linux machine (mapped with samba) using shutil:

shutil.copy("mytarball.tar.gz",unix_dir)

Then, to extract the tarball in linux I do

unix>tar -xvf mytarball.tar.gz  

After the tarball is extracted I lose all the 'x' permissions on my files

Any clues how to solve this issue?

Regards

Answer 1

If you know which of your files should have execute permissions or not, you can set the permissions manually with a filter function:

def set_permissions(tarinfo):
    tarinfo.mode = 0777 # for example
    return tarinfo

tar.add('my_folder', filter=set_permissions)