Executable script in R package `inst/`

Question

I am writing an R package (for internal use, will never be on CRAN). One of my functions calls a shell script containing node.js commands. I've put the file in inst/node_script.sh, so that when the package is installed I can call the script with

system(system.file("./node_script.sh", package = "mypackage"))

This works great on my development machine. But when I install the package on a test machine, node_script.sh is in the proper place, but it drops the executable mode, so I can't run the script without first chmod +x .... Three questions:

• How can I keep the file permissions on my script file through install?
• Is there a clean way to set them afterwards? I'm using devtools::install_github
• Is this even the best way to go about this?

Answer 1

I got this working (kind of) by including a 'chmod' command immediately before the call.

node_file <- system.file("./node_script.sh", package = "mypackage")
Sys.chmod(node_file, mode = "0555")
system(node_file)

It seems very hacky to me, and I'd love an alternative.