chmod not changing file permissions

Question

When I try to change the permissions for a file it doesn't seem to work. chmod says it is changing it but the file permissions remain the same. Can anyone explain what I am doing wrong? Here is a copy of my command line.

~$ sudo chmod -v u+x ex01
mode of 'ex01' changed from 0600 (rw-------) to 0700 (rwx------)
~$ ls -l ex01
-rw------- 1 user user 60297 Feb  6 21:50 ex01

Answer 1

Certain file systems, such as vfat, don't support Unix permissions. The owners and permissions of the files are decided when the file system is mounted. On vfat for example there is an option to set the permissions to whatever you want, and another that sets the execute bit only for .exe, .com, .bat and similar files. See https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/vfat.txt