x bit para o diretório também é chamado como bit de pesquisa. Na verdade, ele permite que você acesse os inodes dos arquivos listados dentro da pasta. Então, se você quiser acessar /home/user/foo/bar.txt, então você deve ter acesso de pesquisa em cada ancestral de bar.txt
Citando a partir da página
Because directories are not used in the same way as regular files, the permissions work slightly (but only slightly) differently. An attempt to list the files in a directory requires read permission for the directory, but not on the files within. An attempt to add a file to a directory, delete a file from a directory, or to rename a file, all require write permission for the directory, but (perhaps surprisingly) not for the files within. Execute permission doesn't apply to directories (a directory can't also be a program). But that permission bit is reused for directories for other purposes.
Execute permission is needed on a directory to be able to cd into it (that is, to make some directory your current working directory).
Execute is needed on a directory to access the inode information of the files within. You need this to search a directory to read the inodes of the files within. For this reason the execute permission on a directory is often called search permission instead.
Search permission is required in many common situations. Consider the command cat /home/user/foo. This command clearly requires read permission for the file foo. But unless you have search permission on /, /home, and /home/user directories, cat can't locate the inode of foo and thus can't read it! You need search permission on every ancestor directory to access the inode of any file (or directory), and you can't read a file unless you can get to its inode.
Por favor, leia mais em seção do diretório de permissões de arquivos.
Atualização: Leo levantou uma boa pergunta. Se nós conhecemos o inode, então podemos acessar um arquivo de um diretório tendo x bit não definido? Eu acredito que não poderíamos fazer isso. Eu não testei pelo programa c, mas usei alguns comandos bash para confirmar isso.
user@user-desktop:~/test$ ls -lart
total 12
drwxr-xr-x 49 user user 4096 2011-11-30 22:37 ..
drwxr-xr-x 3 user user 4096 2011-11-30 22:37 .
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 4096 2011-11-30 22:38 level1
user@user-desktop:~/test$ ls -lart level1/
total 12
drwxr-xr-x 3 user user 4096 2011-11-30 22:37 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 4096 2011-11-30 22:38 .
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 8 2011-11-30 22:38 file1
user@user-desktop:~/test$ stat level1
File: 'level1'
Size: 4096 Blocks: 8 IO Block: 4096 directory
Device: 808h/2056d Inode: 95494 Links: 2
Access: (0755/drwxr-xr-x) Uid: ( 1000/ user) Gid: ( 1000/ user)
Access: 2011-11-30 22:46:16.576702105 +0530
Modify: 2011-11-30 22:38:12.386701913 +0530
Change: 2011-11-30 22:46:08.876702102 +0530
user@user-desktop:~/test$ stat level1/file1
File: 'level1/file1'
Size: 8 Blocks: 8 IO Block: 4096 regular file
Device: 808h/2056d Inode: 60775 Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--) Uid: ( 1000/ user) Gid: ( 1000/ user)
Access: 2011-11-30 22:38:19.846701917 +0530
Modify: 2011-11-30 22:38:16.366701915 +0530
Change: 2011-11-30 22:38:16.366701915 +0530
user@user-desktop:~/test$ chmod -x level1
user@user-desktop:~/test$ stat level1/file1
stat: cannot stat 'level1/file1': Permission denied
user@user-desktop:~/test$ ls -lart level1/
ls: cannot access level1/..: Permission denied
ls: cannot access level1/.: Permission denied
ls: cannot access level1/file1: Permission denied
total 0
-????????? ? ? ? ? ? file1
d????????? ? ? ? ? ? ..
d????????? ? ? ? ? ? .
user@user-desktop:~/test$ cat level1/file1
cat: level1/file1: Permission denied
user@user-desktop:~/test$ find . -inum 95494
./level1
user@user-desktop:~/test$ find . -inum 60775
user@user-desktop:~/test$ find ./level -inum 60775
find: './level': No such file or directory
user@user-desktop:~/test$ find ./level1 -inum 60775