Can search engine crawlers still read a domains robots.txt file if its permission is set to 600?

Question

The domain is running on a linux server, and what I'm trying to accomplish is have a robots.txt file that search engine crawlers can read but the any user can't access/view via the browser.

The whole point of using a robots.txt file is to hide folders/files from ending up in search results in google, yahoo, etc, which in turn the public can access. Even though it hides folders/files from search engine crawlers, the actual robots.txt file is still accessible through http://www.domain.com/robots.txt, which displays all the folders/files I'm trying to hide, unless you can place robots.txt file in the actual directory your trying to hide? I know you can password directories and thats what I intend to do as well.

Answer 1

No they can't.

You could however use something like RewriteCond to detect the user-agent string Mozilla and then rewrite robots.txt to some other file. You would have to exclude the two or three bots that include Mozilla in the user-agent string though. Easy enough but why would you want to do this?