Thanks for your answer. Yes, the idea is to have runnable executables such as executable binaries and shell scripts to run via a parallelizing tool Swift. As for security, current plan is to run Swift enabled Galaxy tools in controlled cloud instances, which we are already doing. With this datatype, we are planning to design a suite of generic tools such that any arbitrary executable can be parallelized within Galaxy and can be run on Clouds and remote clusters. Is it possible to write a type file "bin_or_exe" which can detect the executable bit of data before they are part of Galaxy's indexed data. Thanks, Ketan On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 2:42 AM, Peter Cock <p.j.a.cock@googlemail.com>wrote:

On Tuesday, January 28, 2014, Ketan Maheshwari <ketancmaheshwari@gmail.com> wrote:

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Is there a data type in Galaxy that identifies executables uniquely, eg. from the executable bit in the file perms or some other way?

Thanks,

Galaxy's data types are for data files - runnable tools/executables are handled via XML tool wrappers which define their options etc.

Are you really asking about creating a datatype for a binary executable file? Or letting users run arbitrary tools? Even the idea of electing users run an arbitrary R script is dangerous enough from a security point of view.

Peter