That works fine on OpenBSD. Even a perl script, like this: ---x--x--x 1 root wheel 33 Jan 21 10:13 hello.pl can be executed by non-root user. But it has to be called directly, like: ./hello.pl Trying to run it with "perl hello.pl" will give permission denied... Advanced users will still be able to access the source with ktrace or ptrace though. But if you own the server, you could always hack your kernel to not allow tracing root-owned programs. And the users won't be able to copy your program to run elsewhere since the perms don't allow it...