Got sidetracked - turns out fuse and exfat on usb do not play well with mounts as a user due to changes late last year. It can now only be mounted/unmounted by root.
The second part (also due to fuse) is that to stop fuse (silently as ls still showed the execute bit set) from interfering with execution of files on the mounted device) it must be mounted as the user under a user owned directory such as /home/user (mount cannot deal with this - it did in the past, but something has changed). So the solution is to mount via root as the user you want (via sudo) under a mount point in the users home. This may all be unique to fuse-exfat, and which versions of everything involved as I saw one email on the mechanics of the changes saying fat is handled a little differently due to a different use scenario. And ext2/3/4 etc don't have the problem at all. Auto-mount on device plugin still doesn't happen so thats next on my list. /etc/fstab: /dev/sda1 /home/myuser/mnt auto rw,auto,exec,uid=1000,gid=1000,users,user=myuser 0 0 BillK On 4/30/19 6:51 PM, Mick wrote: > On Tuesday, 30 April 2019 04:07:23 BST Jack wrote: >> On 2019.04.29 21:19, Bill Kenworthy wrote: >>> How does one execute a file on an exfat formatted usb key? >>> >>> I have an encryption app that must be executed from the drive to work >>> (secure-stick). Works great in windows, linux is a real pain because >>> I >>> think udisks is forcing execute off and I cant overide it. >>> >>> >>> help! >>> >>> BillK >> At least show us the output of "ls -l" on the file in question. Does >> "chown +x file" have any effect? Why do you think you can't execute >> such a file? What happens when you try? How have you tried? >> >> Jack > I just mounted a USB stick which has been formatted with exFAT and the files > and directories are executable: > > # ls -la /run/media/michael/VERBATIM32G/ > total 10672960 > drwxrwxrwx 1 michael michael 32768 Jan 1 1970 . > drwxr-x---+ 3 root root 60 Apr 30 11:40 .. > > I tested running a bash script by passing the full path to the terminal and > it > works as expected.