posix: give checkexec a fast path; keep the check files and test read only Before, Mercurial would create a new temporary file every time, stat it, change its exec mode, stat it again, and delete it. Most of this dance was done to handle the rare and not-so-essential case of VFAT mounts on unix. The cost of that was paid by the much more common and important case of using normal file systems. Instead, try to create and preserve .hg/cache/checkisexec and .hg/cache/checknoexec with and without exec flag set. If the files exist and have correct exec flags set, we can conclude that that file system supports the exec flag. Best case, the whole exec check can thus be done with two stat calls. Worst case, we delete the wrong files and check as usual. That will be because temporary loss of exec bit or on file systems without support for the exec bit. In that case we check as we did before, with the additional overhead of one extra stat call. It is possible that this different test algorithm in some cases on odd file systems will give different behaviour. Again, I think it will be rare and special cases and I think it is worth the risk. test-clone.t happens to show the situation where checkisexec is left behind from the old style check, while checknoexec only will be created next time a exec check will be performed.