fstab ignoring exec flag

December 12, 2018 / linux

I recently came across an issue with bash throwing a ‘permission denied’ error when trying to execute anything from a specific drive.

Despite setting the exec flag in /etc/fstab, the issue remained.

It turns out that, as per the mount(8) manpage, the user flag overrides the exec one, so the correct order if you need both is user,exec.