what's a CGI bin for

[Anon]

What's it mean when a host says it has full CGI bin support? If they also have php do I still need the CGI bin. My site will most likely be static content using php to keep everything correctly linked together and the templates updated. So dynamic but with static content, maybe some guestbooks or something like that. Can't the scripts that you put in a cgi bin just be made in php, or does the cgi bin provide a place for php to "work in"?
Thanks

[Anon]

cgi-bin stands for common gateway interface binaries. you can write applications in just about any language (perl, c, python, ruby, even applescript) that are called via the webserver. these scripts can do pretty much all of the things that php can except mix in html... all html output in a cgi script has to be done via echo() or printf() or similar. cgi's often don't have automatic processing of get and post data or cookies and the api those languages have is usually not as well suited for web programming (ie, things like urlencode() often have to be done manually).

php and other inline scripting languages were developed for a reason... writing cgis is a royal pain!

[greg252]

For security reasons (from what I understand) CGI scripts are "allowed" to run in the cgi-bin directory by apache (or other).

PHP, if set up correctly, can run anywhere.

[Anon]

right. although it appears that yr calling yr cgis from htdocs/cgi-bin/ yr really calling them from htdocs/../cgi-bin. the cgi-bin directory is not web-hittable for security reasons.