Well, if you are going to store a password in a shell script (not a good idea IMHO), then make sure the people that need to use this file only have execute permission (read permission is not necessary).

Not setting read permission will only work if you are root, or if the shell is setuid root. And that's because a process with root level permissions can read any file, regardless of its permissions. If the shell is denied read access to the file, how on earth is the shell going to know what it should do? It's the same for a Perl program - if perl can't read the file, nothing will happen.

Abigail