Remove execute permission on file downloaded on a Mac

Question

We have a web app running on a Windows server, which allows a user to do some processing and download the results. The result is a set of files which are dynamically created on the server and zipped into a single file for facilitating the download process.

Everything works fine on Windows, but when users download the file from the web app on a Mac, the contents of the zip file have the execute (chmod +x) permission set (I presume that the same happens on *NIX and Linux machines). This can, of course, be removed by running the 'chmod -x' command, but is there a way by which one can remove the execute permission on the files, so that when downloaded on a Mac, the files don't have the execute permission set by default?

Answer 1

I believe it's not possible - .zip files don't contain permissions, so on a Mac it has to default to "most permissive" (otherwise it's possible that there are applications inside the zip that wouldn't be marked as executable when they need to be).

tar s, for instance, do record permissions, but that'd be a bit more difficult to create on a Windows server.