Zsh Permission Denied: 22 of 47 Ran a Directory

I made seven files and folders in /tmp on this Mac mini and tried to run each one from zsh. Six of them failed with the same line, zsh:1: permission denied: ./name, and exit code 126. One was a script with no execute bit. One was a folder. One was a script whose #! interpreter was not executable, while the script itself was -rwxr-xr-x. One had an ACL that ls -l does not show. One sat on a volume mounted noexec, also -rwxr-xr-x. One was a symlink to a file with no execute bit. The seventh case, writing to a read-only folder, printed the same words with exit code 1, because the shell never tried to run anything.

The message names the path zsh gave up on, not the reason. To find out which reasons people actually hit, I pulled every Stack Exchange question with "zsh permission denied" in the title and sorted all 47. The largest group is not a permissions problem at all: 22 of the 47 were typing the name of a folder as if it were a command.

Seven ways to get the same line

All of these ran on macOS 26.4.1 (build 25E253) with the stock zsh 5.9. The file under test was a two-line #!/bin/sh script unless the row says otherwise.

Three rows show an execute bit and still fail, so "run chmod +x" fixes only the first row. The interpreter row is the least obvious one: the kernel refuses the script because the interpreter named on its first line cannot be executed, but zsh blames the script. The same row with the interpreter made executable ran fine. A nested shebang is allowed here.

Four things I expected to trigger the error did not. chflags uchg (the immutable flag) did not block execution. Neither did a com.apple.quarantine attribute I added by hand with xattr -w. A symlink to a file that does not exist printed no such file or directory and exit 127. A script saved with Windows line endings printed bad interpreter: /bin/sh^M: no such file or directory, also 127. If you see one of those two messages instead, the problem is somewhere else. The zsh exec format error covers the case where the file runs but is built for the wrong system.

Exit code 126 or 1 tells you which half failed

POSIX gives a command that is found but cannot be executed exit status 126. A failed redirection is not an exec at all, and it returned 1 in both shells I tried. zsh prints both as permission denied: path. bash also uses one wording for both (bash: ./ro/out: Permission denied), so neither shell's text tells them apart. So the first thing to check is echo $? straight after the error:

• 126: zsh found something at that path and exec refused it. Look at the file, its folders, its interpreter and its volume.
• 1: a >, >> or < in the command could not open its file. The command itself may never have been the problem. sudo echo x >> /etc/hosts fails this way because the redirect runs as you, before sudo starts.

If a pipeline hides the code, the pipe exit code post shows how to read each stage's status.

What 47 Stack Exchange questions were really about

On 2026-09-28 I used the Stack Exchange API to search titles for "zsh: permission denied" and "zsh permission denied" on Stack Overflow, Ask Different, Super User, Unix & Linux and Ask Ubuntu. That returned 47 distinct questions (45 from Stack Overflow, one each from Ask Different and Super User), from 2014 to 2024. I read each question and its accepted or top-voted answer and sorted them by what the named path turned out to be.

The 22 folder cases come in a few shapes. People paste an export PATH= value and run the folder (/opt/homebrew/opt/[email protected]/libexec/bin, ~/flutter/bin). People type a path to open it (/Users/name, /Applications/Sublime Text.app). People copy a tutorial line that includes the prompt, so ~ $ pwd becomes "run my home folder". One Rails user had an alias named rails that pointed at a project folder.

The strangest one is the gam question: ~/bin was on PATH and the install had created a folder ~/bin/gam/. I rebuilt it: with a folder named gam first on PATH, zsh prints permission denied: gam (exit 126) and bash prints gam: command not found (exit 127). zsh's command lookup puts the folder in its $commands table and tries to execute it, so the error sends you after permissions when the real problem is a missing binary.

If you type a folder name and want zsh to cd into it, that is the AUTO_CD option. Two accepted answers in the set were simply setopt auto_cd. It only applies to a bare word that is a folder. /path/to/folder args still fails.

The eight "file could not be executed" cases were mostly the textbook ones: ./startup.sh, ./gradlew, bin/rake, fixed with chmod +x. One was a static library (.a) someone tried to run. That is the case most search results answer, and it is 8 of 47. The eight redirect cases were almost all writes to a dotfile or system file (~/.bash_profile, ~/.zshrc, /etc/hosts). In one of them the API call contained <POST ID>/upvote, which zsh parsed as two redirects. Six questions never got an answer that named a cause. One Ask Different answer blamed quarantine, which my hand-added attribute did not reproduce.

"zsh: permission denied: claude"

This version of the error shows up in the Claude Code tracker. In issue #57178, an npm-global install auto-updated and left the claude symlink pointing at bin/claude.exe. From then on, every claude printed zsh: permission denied: claude. The report says claude.exe does not exist, but a dangling symlink gives no such file or directory in my test, so permission denied suggests the target was there and could not be executed. Commenters there and on #52107 describe it as a small stub left in place of the real binary. On this machine the native install is a symlink into a versions folder:

$ ls -l $(whence -p claude)
lrwxr-xr-x@ 1 sg-mini  staff  51 Sep 28 10:03 /Users/sg-mini/.local/bin/claude -> /Users/sg-mini/.local/share/claude/versions/2.1.283
$ file -L $(whence -p claude)
/Users/sg-mini/.local/bin/claude: Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64

If yours says permission denied, run the same two commands. A target that is not a Mach-O binary, or that has no x in its mode, is the broken update, and reinstalling replaces it. The other Claude Code case looks like the redirect half. In #8896, version 2.0.5 printed zsh:1: permission denied: /var/folders/.../claude-XXXX-cwd before every Bash tool command, and the command still ran. The reporter traced it to the harness writing its working-directory file, not to the command, which fits the exit-1 row of the table above.

A function that names the reason

I wrote this to check the six exec cases in order and ran it against each file above. It reported the right cause for all six, including the noexec volume where the file shows rwx but [[ -x ]] is false.

# why-denied: print the first reason zsh would refuse to exec $1
why-denied() {
  local p=${1:A} d
  [[ $1 != */* ]] && p=${commands[$1]:-$(whence -p $1)} && p=${p:A}
  [[ -z $p ]] && { echo "not found on PATH"; return; }
  [[ -d $p ]] && { echo "directory: $p"; return; }
  d=${p:h}; while [[ $d != / ]]; do [[ -x $d ]] || { echo "parent not searchable: $d"; return; }; d=${d:h}; done
  if [[ ! -x $p ]]; then
    if mount | grep -F " on $(df $p | awk 'NR==2{print $NF}') (" | grep -q noexec; then echo "noexec mount: $p"
    elif ls -le $p | grep -q 'deny execute'; then echo "ACL denies execute: $p"
    else echo "no execute bit: $p"; fi
    return
  fi
  local i=$(head -1 $p | sed -n 's/^#! *\([^ ]*\).*/\1/p')
  [[ -n $i && ! -x $i ]] && { echo "interpreter not executable: $i"; return; }
  echo "no permission reason found; check the exit code (1 = a redirect failed)"
}

$ why-denied gam
directory: /private/tmp/zperm/pathdir/gam
$ why-denied ./badinterp.sh
interpreter not executable: /tmp/zperm/interp_noexec
$ why-denied ./mnt2/good.sh
noexec mount: /private/tmp/zperm/mnt2/good.sh

It does not know about sandboxes, TCC or MDM policy, and it only reads the first word of a shebang, so #!/usr/bin/env python3 is checked as /usr/bin/env. When the process is killed after it starts rather than refused, the message changes to zsh: killed, and a different set of causes applies.

FAQ

How do I fix "zsh: permission denied" on Mac?

Run echo $? right after the error. If it is 126, check whether the path is a folder (ls -ld path), then add the execute bit with chmod +x path. If it already has one, check its parent folders, its #! interpreter, ACLs (ls -le) and whether the volume is mounted noexec. If it is 1, a redirect such as > file could not write, and the fix is the destination's permissions, not the command's.

Why does zsh say permission denied instead of command not found?

zsh found something with that name on your PATH, usually a folder. In my test a folder named gam on PATH made zsh print "permission denied: gam" with exit 126, while bash printed "command not found". Run whence -a name or ls -ld $(whence -p name) to see what zsh found.

Why does chmod +x not fix zsh permission denied?

Because the file was not the problem. On macOS 26.4.1 I got the same error with a correctly executable script when its #! interpreter was not executable, when a parent folder lacked the search bit, when an ACL denied execute, and when the volume was mounted noexec. It also appears when a > redirect fails, which chmod on the command cannot fix.

How this was checked: the seven cases, the folder-on-PATH comparison with bash 3.2.57 and the why-denied function were run on this Mac mini on 2026-09-28 (macOS 26.4.1 build 25E253, zsh 5.9) in /tmp/zperm, which was deleted afterwards. The noexec case used a 5 MB APFS disk image mounted with mount_apfs -o noexec. The census covers every question the Stack Exchange API returned for the two title searches on five sites that day (47). The categories are my reading of each question and its top answer, and six stay unresolved. The Claude Code cases come from the linked GitHub issues. I did not reproduce the broken auto-update.