Good question. Perhaps it carries a PAYLOAD (TROJAN). ;) ;)

Seriously. To the OP; There's precious little reason to add the x bit to a document. In fact, it could potentially cause you grief. If exposed to the wild (it's within your web space, or those other than yourself have access), it could be used in malicious ways.

Perhaps you would find one of the following perms more suitable
0644
0444
In fact, unless you actually need to alter the contents of the file. 0444 would be your best choice.

--Chris

#!/usr/bin/perl -Tw
use Perl::Always or die;
my $perl_version = (5.12.5);
print $perl_version;