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CGI Programming

The CGI mechanism is different from the one previously used on the Main Departmental Web Server. Your CGI programs must now be in files whose names end in ".cgi" and they must be in the directory "~/public_html/cgi-bin". It is strongly recommended that you set the permissions on that directory so that it is not searchable. When you create it you should do:
	cd ~/public_html
	mkdir cgi-bin
	chmod 711 cgi-bin
Whenever you set up CGI programs in that directory you should set it up so that they are not readable or executable by anyone but you. This can be done with:
	cd ~/public_html/cgi-bin
	chmod 700 *
This way people on the Web cannot view your CGI programs and look for security holes in them.

You reference the CGI programs as "/~username/cgi-bin/script.cgi", usually in an "ACTION" attribute. For example if the user "kensmith" had a CGI script named "foo.cgi" (the file "foo.cgi" on UNIX would need to be "~kensmith/public_html/cgi-bin/foo.cgi") it would be referenced as:


	<FORM ACTION="/~kensmith/cgi-bin/script.cgi" METHOD="POST">

... for the web server to find it.


This page last modified: Thursday, June 14, 2012
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