CGI script ==>
Common Gateway Interface
<World-Wide Web> (CGI) A standard for running external programs from a
World-Wide Web HTTP server. CGI specifies how to pass arguments to the program
as part of the HTTP request. It also defines a set of environment variables that
are made available to the program. The program generates output, typically HTML,
which the web server processes and passes back to the browser. Alternatively,
the program can request URL redirection. CGI allows the returned output to
depend in any arbitrary way on the request.
The CGI program can, for example, access information in a database and format
the results as HTML. The program can access any data that a normal application
program can, however the facilities available to CGI programs are usually
limited for security reasons.
Although CGI programs can be compiled programs, they are more often written in a
(semi) interpreted language such as Perl, or as Unix shell scripts, hence the
common name "CGI script".
Here is a trivial CGI script written in Perl. (It requires the "CGI" module
available from CPAN).
#!/usr/bin/perl
use CGI qw(:standard);
print header, start_html,
h1("CGI Test"),
"Your IP address is: ", remote_host(),
end_html;
When run it produces an HTTP header and then a simple HTML page containing
the IP address or hostname of the machine that
generated the initial request. If run from a command
prompt it outputs:
Content-Type: text/html
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML//EN">
<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Untitled Document</TITLE>
</HEAD><BODY><H1>CGI Test</H1>Your IP address is:
localhost</BODY></HTML>
The CGI program might be saved as the file "test.pl" in the appropriate
directory on a web server, e.g. "/home/httpd/test".
Accessing the appropriate URL, e.g. http://www.acme.com/test/test.cgi, would
cause the program to run and a custom page produced to be returned.
Early web servers required all CGI programs to be installed in one directory
called cgi-bin but it is much better to keep them with the HTML files to which
they relate unless they are truly global to the site. All modern web servers
make this easy. Similarly, it is neither necessary nor desirable for all CGI
programs to have the extension ".cgi", especially on Microsoft Windows servers.
Each CGI request is handled by a new process. If the process fails to terminate
for some reason, or if requests are received faster than the server can respond
to them, the server may become swamped with processes. In order to improve
performance, Netscape devised NSAPI and Microsoft developed the ISAPI standard
which allow CGI-like tasks to run as part of the main server process, thus
avoiding the overhead of creating a new process to handle each CGI invocation.
Current version: 1.1.
NCSA.
(2004-12-27)
Nearby terms:
Common Communication Services « Common Desktop
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