I was working on migrating a web server, and one of the back end script is not executing properly from cron. So I manually attempted to execute the php script, and instead of executing it, the scripted was printed to the console. The permission is set to 777.
[root@hostname]# php script.php
<?
$log->LogStart();
.........
.....
......
?>
<?phpinstead of<??phpCLI command, the script doesn't need to be executable. It could just be 0644.