Can i store unix permissions in a zip file (built with apache ant)?

To expand on Blaine’s answer, you can use <zipfileset> child elements to specify permissions:

<zip destfile="build/MyApplication.zip" encoding="UTF-8">

    <zipfileset dir="${content-dir}" encoding="UTF-8"
        includes="**/setup.sh" filemode="755"/>

    <zipfileset dir="${content-dir}" encoding="UTF-8"
        excludes="**/setup.sh"/>

</zip>

You cannot store Linux/Unix file permissions in a ZIP file.

Edit (after comments) by using the "external attributes" field inside the ZIP header these attributes can be store inside a ZIP file. GNU's unzip is apparently able to read that additional field and restore file permissions. ^{I'm not sure when this was added to the ZIP format as the early versions - coming from a MS-DOS world - did not have support for this.}

The TAR format - being a "native" Unix/Linux format - has been designed to include file attributes and Ant can create TAR files that will preserve attributes across all Linux/Unix operating systems.

<tar compression="gzip" destfile="my-archive.tgz">
  <tarfileset mode="544" dir="dir_with_shell_scripts">
     <include name="*.sh"/>
  </tarfileset>
</tar>

I think you can do this with Apache Commons Compress.

First paragraph:

Access to internal and external attributes (which are used to store Unix permission by some zip implementations).

Take a look at the API and look for setUnixMode()

You don't have to switch to tar files. I don't know why people who don't know Ant are offering advice on this topic.

Use zipfileset's filemode parameter. Documented at http://ant.apache.org/manual/Types/zipfileset.html