What are the proper permissions for CGI scripts and their data files?

Many CGI scripts will instruct you to modify the permissions on the script, its data files, and your directories. This is because, with many web hosts, you must severely relax access permissions on your files for CGI scripts to operate with them, due to the security scheme in place. (All user scripts run with the web server's "permissions" on the system.)
This is NOT necessary with QWK.Net servers. (Scripts run with your permissions, rather than the web server's.) In fact, changing some permissions on CGI scripts may cause the system to refuse to run them. Specifically, you must not change your CGI scripts to be writable by "group" or "other", or they will be rejected.

CGI scripts themselves must still be marked as executable to run, but you should not change any other permissions of the script, or your cgi-bin directory. If your software accepts a numeric permissions description, set your scripts to "755" permissions.