| A CGI is a program that translates
data from a web server and then displays that data on
a web page or in an email. CGI involves the transfer
of data between a server and a CGI program (called a
script). This allows HTML pages to interact with other
programming applications. These scripts make web pages
interactive. Page counters, forms, guest books, random
text/images and other features can be driven by CGI
scripts.
Usually a CGI program is a small program that takes
data from a web server and does something with it, like
putting the content of a form into an e-mail message,
or turning the data into a database query.
CGI "scripts" are just scripts which use
CGI. CGI is often confused with Perl, which is a programming
language, while CGI is an interface to the server from
a particular program. Perl is an application of CGI,
as well as MIVA, Python, PHP3, and other scripting languages.
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