"CGI" stands for "Common Gateway Interface", a fancy name meaning computer programs running on the web server that can be invoked from a WWW page at the browser. The "bin" part alludes to the binary executables that result from compiled or assembled programs. It is a bit misleading because cgis can also be Unix shell scripts or interpreted languages like Perl.

A typical use for cgi is the processing of online forms. When the user fills in the boxes on the form and hits the SUBMIT button, the cgi program specified in the html will be run at the server, and the information in the boxes become available to the program as parameters. The program, being a program, can then do anything the programmer wanted it to do.

"cgiemail", for example, is a canned program written in C that gathers up the contents of the boxes on the form and emails them to a specified destination, then sends a WWW page confirming the action.

"imagemap" is another common use for cgi. Here, the X-Y coordinates of the pointer on an image are correlated with a specification table, so that clicking on different parts of the image will result in different links being followed.

Other cgis might ask for a password, check the password, then access a database for requested information. What it does is up to the programmer, but we do ask that the cgis are reasonable in their usage of CPU time and memory. While we do not require that they be submitted for approval first, out of control programs that hog the CPU will be hunted down and killed by our death robot.

Your cgis reside in a web subdirectory named cgi-bin directory under your www directory. If your domain is named company.com, you would then access your scripts as /cgi-company/

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- Last modified on 3/16/2003 -